how to send a email body part through MIMEMultipart

Question

I am just curious to know if MIMEMultipart has any attribute in it where I can pass my email body part ... Only part I have come up with is

msg = MIMEMultipart()
msg["From"] = emailfrom
msg["To"] = emailto
msg["Subject"] = "hi find the attached file"
msg.preamble = "please PFA"

Is there anything like

 msg["Body"] = I will add a string or a text file

I googled for it and found

body = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
body.attach(MIMEText(text))

but it's not working in my case.

And one more thing - how does MIMEMultipart('alternative') work? What functionality does it provide?

Answer 1

The purpose of a multipart container is to contain other MIME parts. If you only have one part, by definition it's not multipart.

multipart/alternative is useful when you have the same content in different renderings. A common case is to have the message body in both text/plain (no fonts, colors, images, or other "rich" content) and text/html. Typically, the user will have configured their client to prefer one over the other, and so it will then display whatever the user prefers. Somewhat less commonly, the user has a client which can display one type and not the other, so then it's a matter of technical necessity, not user preference, to display the supported version.

multipart/related is useful when you have multiple parts constituting a message. For example, the text/html part in the multipart/alternative might want to pull in images which are supplied as "related" parts. So a common structure in fact is

multipart/alternative
    +---- text/plain
    +---- multipart/related
              +---- text/html
              +---- image/png
              +---- image/png

or even another multipart/related above that if there is an attachment which is independent of the multipart/alternative renderings.

For your concrete example, just declare the body part as text/plain instead:

msg = MIMEText(text)
msg["From"] = emailfrom
msg["To"] = emailto
msg["Subject"] = "hi find the attached file"

For what it's worth, you should normally not need to mess with the MIME preamble, or imagine that a client will display it. (There will only be a preamble when there are multiple parts.)

If you do have an actual attachment you want to include, then this:

msg = MIMEMultipart()
msg["From"] = emailfrom
msg["To"] = emailto
msg["Subject"] = "hi find the attached file"
msg.attach(MIMEText(text))
attachment = MIMEBase('application', 'octet-stream')
attachment.set_payload(data)
msg.attach(attachment)

Answer 2

This works for me:

msg = MIMEMultipart()
msg['From'], msg['To'], msg['Subject'] = ... # specify your sender, receiver, subject attributes
body = 'This is the body of the email.'
body = MIMEText(body) # convert the body to a MIME compatible string
msg.attach(body) # attach it to your main message

You attach the body to the msg, and body in your case should be the MIMEText object.