How to get line breaks in e-mail sent using Python's smtplib?

Question

I have written a script that writes a message to a text file and also sends it as an email. Everything goes well, except the email finally appears to be all in one line.

I add line breaks by \n and it works for the text file but not for the email. Do you know what could be the possible reason?

---

Here's my code:

import smtplib, sys import traceback def send_error(sender, recipient, headers, body):      SMTP_SERVER = 'smtp.gmail.com'     SMTP_PORT = 587     session = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', 587)     session.ehlo()     session.starttls()     session.ehlo     session.login(sender, 'my password')     send_it = session.sendmail(sender, recipient, headers + "\r\n\r\n" +  body)     session.quit()     return send_it   SMTP_SERVER = 'smtp.gmail.com' SMTP_PORT = 587 sender = '[email protected]' recipient = '[email protected]' subject = 'report' body = "Dear Student, \n Please send your report\n Thank you for your attention" open('student.txt', 'w').write(body)   headers = ["From: " + sender,                "Subject: " + subject,                "To: " + recipient,                "MIME-Version: 1.0",                "Content-Type: text/html"] headers = "\r\n".join(headers) send_error(sender, recipient, headers, body) 

Answer 1

Unfortunately for us all, not every type of program or application uses the same standardization that python does.

Looking at your question i notice your header is: "Content-Type: text/html"

Which means you need to use HTML style tags for your new-lines, these are called line-breaks. <br>

Your text should be:

"Dear Student, <br> Please send your report<br> Thank you for your attention" 

If you would rather use character type new-lines, you must change the header to read: "Content-Type: text/plain"

You would still have to change the new-line character from a single \n to the double \r\n which is used in email.

Your text would be:

"Dear Student, \r\n Please send your report\r\n Thank you for your attention" 

Answer 2

You have your message body declared to have HTML content ("Content-Type: text/html"). The HTML code for line break is <br>. You should either change your content type to text/plain or use the HTML markup for line breaks instead of plain \n as the latter gets ignored when rendering a HTML document.

---

As a side note, also have a look at the email package. There are some classes that can simplify the definition of E-Mail messages for you (with examples).

For example you could try (untested):

import smtplib from email.mime.text import MIMEText  # define content recipients = ["[email protected]"] sender = "[email protected]" subject = "report reminder" body = """ Dear Student, Please send your report Thank you for your attention """  # make up message msg = MIMEText(body) msg['Subject'] = subject msg['From'] = sender msg['To'] = ", ".join(recipients)  # sending session = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', 587) session.starttls() session.login(sender, 'my password') send_it = session.sendmail(sender, recipients, msg.as_string()) session.quit()