How to send a zip file as an attachment in python?

Question

I have looked through many tutorials, as well as other question here on stack overflow, and the documentation and explanation are at minimum, just unexplained code. I would

Answer 1

I agree the email package is not well documented yet. I investigated it before and wrote a wrapper module that simplifies these kinds of tasks. For example, the following works:

from pycopia import ezmail

# Get the data
data = open("/usr/lib64/python2.7/test/zipdir.zip").read()

# Make a proper mime message object.
zipattachement = ezmail.MIMEApplication.MIMEApplication(data, "zip",
        filename="zipdir.zip")

# send it.
ezmail.ezmail(["Here is the zip file.", zipattachement],
        To="me@mydomain.com", From="me@mydomain.com", subject="zip send test")

And that's all you need once you have everything installed and configured. :-)

Answer 2

I don't really see the problem. Just omit the part which creates the zip file and, instead, just load the zip file you have.

Essentially, this part here

msg = MIMEBase('application', 'zip')
msg.set_payload(zf.read())
encoders.encode_base64(msg)
msg.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment', 
               filename=the_file + '.zip')
themsg.attach(msg)

creates the attachment. The

msg.set_payload(zf.read())

sets, well, the payload of the attachment to what you read from the file zf (probably meaning zip file).

Just open your zip file beforehand and let this line read from it.