Flask – Mail

A web based application is often required to have a feature of sending mail to the users/clients. Flask-Mail extension makes it very easy to set up a simple interface with any email server.
At first, Flask-Mail extension should be installed with the help of pip utility.

pip install Flask-Mail

Then Flask-Mail needs to be configured by setting values of the following application parameters.

Sr.No	Parameters & Description
1	MAIL_SERVER Name/IP address of email server
2	MAIL_PORT Port number of server used
3	MAIL_USE_TLS Enable/disable Transport Security Layer encryption
4	MAIL_USE_SSL Enable/disable Secure Sockets Layer encryption
5	MAIL_DEBUG Debug support. Default is Flask application’s debug status
6	MAIL_USERNAME User name of sender
7	MAIL_PASSWORD password of sender
8	MAIL_DEFAULT_SENDER sets default sender
9	MAIL_MAX_EMAILS Sets maximum mails to be sent
10	MAIL_SUPPRESS_SEND Sending suppressed if app.testing set to true
11	MAIL_ASCII_ATTACHMENTS If set to true, attached filenames converted to ASCII

The flask-mail module contains definitions of the following important classes.

Mail class

It manages email-messaging requirements. The class constructor takes the following form −

flask-mail.Mail(app = None)

The Constructor takes the Flask application object as a parameter.

Methods of Mail class

Sr.No	Methods & Description
1	send() Sends contents of Message class object
2	connect() Opens connection with mail host
3	send_message() Sends message object

Message class

It encapsulates an email message. Message class constructor has several parameters −

flask-mail.Message(subject, recipients, body, html, sender, cc, bcc, 
   reply-to, date, charset, extra_headers, mail_options, rcpt_options)

Message class methods

attach() − adds an attachment to message. This method takes the following parameters −

• filename − name of file to attach
• content_type − MIME type of file
• data − raw file data
• disposition − content disposition, if any.

add_recipient() − adds another recipient to message
In the following example, SMTP server of Google’s gmail service is used as MAIL_SERVER for Flask-Mail configuration.
Step 1 − Import Mail and Message class from flask-mail module in the code.

from flask_mail import Mail, Message

Step 2 − Then Flask-Mail is configured as per following settings.

app.config['MAIL_SERVER']='smtp.gmail.com'
app.config['MAIL_PORT'] = 465
app.config['MAIL_USERNAME'] = 'yourId@gmail.com'
app.config['MAIL_PASSWORD'] = '*****'
app.config['MAIL_USE_TLS'] = False
app.config['MAIL_USE_SSL'] = True

Step 3 − Create an instance of Mail class.

mail = Mail(app)

Step 4 − Set up a Message object in a Python function mapped by URL rule (‘/’).

@app.route("/")
def index():
   msg = Message('Hello', sender = 'yourId@gmail.com', recipients = ['id1@gmail.com'])
   msg.body = "This is the email body"
   mail.send(msg)
   return "Sent"

Step 5 − The entire code is given below. Run the following script in Python Shell and visit http://localhost:5000/.

from flask import Flask
from flask_mail import Mail, Message

app =Flask(__name__)
mail=Mail(app)

app.config['MAIL_SERVER']='smtp.gmail.com'
app.config['MAIL_PORT'] = 465
app.config['MAIL_USERNAME'] = 'yourId@gmail.com'
app.config['MAIL_PASSWORD'] = '*****'
app.config['MAIL_USE_TLS'] = False
app.config['MAIL_USE_SSL'] = True
mail = Mail(app)

@app.route("/")
def index():
   msg = Message('Hello', sender = 'yourId@gmail.com', recipients = ['id1@gmail.com'])
   msg.body = "Hello Flask message sent from Flask-Mail"
   mail.send(msg)
   return "Sent"

if __name__ == '__main__':
   app.run(debug = True)

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