Sending e-mail

Although Python makes sending e-mails relatively easy via the smtplib library, Scrapy provides its own facility for sending e-mails which is very easy to use and it’s implemented using Twisted non-blocking IO, to avoid interfering with the non-blocking IO of the crawler. It also provides a simple API for sending attachments and it’s very easy to configure, with a few settings.

Quick example

There are two ways to instantiate the mail sender. You can instantiate it using the standard __init__ method:

  1. from scrapy.mail import MailSender
  2. mailer = MailSender()

Or you can instantiate it passing a Scrapy settings object, which will respect the settings:

  1. mailer = MailSender.from_settings(settings)

And here is how to use it to send an e-mail (without attachments):

  1. mailer.send(to=["someone@example.com"], subject="Some subject", body="Some body", cc=["another@example.com"])

MailSender class reference

MailSender is the preferred class to use for sending emails from Scrapy, as it uses Twisted non-blocking IO, like the rest of the framework.

class scrapy.mail.``MailSender(smtphost=None, mailfrom=None, smtpuser=None, smtppass=None, smtpport=None)[source]

  • Parameters

    • smtphost (str or bytes) – the SMTP host to use for sending the emails. If omitted, the MAIL_HOST setting will be used.

    • mailfrom (str) – the address used to send emails (in the From: header). If omitted, the MAIL_FROM setting will be used.

    • smtpuser – the SMTP user. If omitted, the MAIL_USER setting will be used. If not given, no SMTP authentication will be performed.

    • smtppass (str or bytes) – the SMTP pass for authentication.

    • smtpport (int) – the SMTP port to connect to

    • smtptls (boolean) – enforce using SMTP STARTTLS

    • smtpssl (boolean) – enforce using a secure SSL connection

  • classmethod from_settings(settings)[source]

    Instantiate using a Scrapy settings object, which will respect these Scrapy settings.

  • send(to, subject, body, cc=None, attachs=(), mimetype=’text/plain’, charset=None)[source]

    Send email to the given recipients.

    • Parameters

      • to (str or list of str) – the e-mail recipients

      • subject (str) – the subject of the e-mail

      • cc (str or list of str) – the e-mails to CC

      • body (str) – the e-mail body

      • attachs (iterable) – an iterable of tuples (attach_name, mimetype, file_object) where attach_name is a string with the name that will appear on the e-mail’s attachment, mimetype is the mimetype of the attachment and file_object is a readable file object with the contents of the attachment

      • mimetype (str) – the MIME type of the e-mail

      • charset (str) – the character encoding to use for the e-mail contents

Mail settings

These settings define the default __init__ method values of the MailSender class, and can be used to configure e-mail notifications in your project without writing any code (for those extensions and code that uses MailSender).

MAIL_FROM

Default: 'scrapy@localhost'

Sender email to use (From: header) for sending emails.

MAIL_HOST

Default: 'localhost'

SMTP host to use for sending emails.

MAIL_PORT

Default: 25

SMTP port to use for sending emails.

MAIL_USER

Default: None

User to use for SMTP authentication. If disabled no SMTP authentication will be performed.

MAIL_PASS

Default: None

Password to use for SMTP authentication, along with MAIL_USER.

MAIL_TLS

Default: False

Enforce using STARTTLS. STARTTLS is a way to take an existing insecure connection, and upgrade it to a secure connection using SSL/TLS.

MAIL_SSL

Default: False

Enforce connecting using an SSL encrypted connection