Python Sending Email using SMTP

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is used as a protocol to handle the email transfer using Python. It is used to route emails between email servers. It is an application layer protocol which allows to users to send mail to another. The receiver retrieves email using the protocols POP(Post Office Protocol) and IMAP(Internet Message Access Protocol).

When the server listens for the TCP connection from a client, it initiates a connection on port 587.

Python provides a smtplib module, which defines an the SMTP client session object used to send emails to an internet machine. For this purpose, we have to import the smtplib module using the import statement.

Sending email from gmail

There are cases where the emails are sent using the Gmail SMTP server. In this case, we can pass Gmail as the SMTP server instead of using the localhost with the port 587.

This may make your Gmail ask you for access to less secure apps if you're using Gmail. You will need to turn this ON temporarily for this to work.