How to encode international characters in recipient names (NOT addresses) with smtplib.sendmail() in Python 3?

Question

I\'m using a standard smtplib.sendmail() call in my Python 3 program to send emails, as follows:

smtp_session.sendmail(\'The Sender \',          


        

Answer 1

Characters in SMTP headers are required to be printable ASCII, in the numeric range 33-126 inclusive. If you need to represent characters outside that range in an SMTP header then you must use the encoding method defined by RFC 2231 (which is an evolution of an earlier method defined by RFC 2047).

Historically in Python you would have used the Header class from the email.header module to build suitably-encoded headers. That's still available in Python 3, but in Python 3 the newer recommendation is to use the EmailMessage class from the email.message module to construct the entire message, and let it take care of encoding any headers that need special treatment.