YukunJ / Shoot-Me-An-Email

This is a small toy email notifier to easily send your friend an email using Python.

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Shoot Me An Email

This is a small Python toy email notifier using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), compatible with multiple email servers including gmail, qq, 126, etc. This is done in 30 minutes and not intended to be used for serious purposes, though it works just fine.

Story Background

In early March, I went to Jersey City to in-person visit a few potential apartments I want to lease after graduation.

Leasing agents told me, given the 60-day move-out notice policy, lease for June will mostly be available and listed on website by end of March. Given the anticipated hot market by that time, I was advised to check the website for new listing on a regular basis.

I thought to myself: Oh, I could probably write a program to crawl for new lease listing and notify me via email.

However, after I've written the email notification component, I found that different apartment websites' HTMLs all differ dramatically. So I just gave up: I'd better just refresh the web page every few hours.

This leaves the email notifier component alone.

How to Use It?

To use this python script to send emails, you first need an gmail account. You can go to Google website for registration, and enable two-factor authentication to retrieve an app password. We will use this password to login.

For safety concern, this script reads your mail server address and password from environment variables. You should do:

$ export HOST_ADDR=[e-mail]
$ export HOST_PWD=your-app-password

After this, to send an email to your friends is as easy as follows:

from emailer import Emailer

if __name__ == "__main__":
    # initiate an Emailer using your email account and password
    my_emailer = Emailer()
    # add subscribers to broadcast list
    my_emailer.add_subscriber("[e-mail]")
    my_emailer.add_subscriber("[e-mail]")
    # broadcast email, both Jason and Tommy get it
    my_emailer.broadcast_email("This is a broadcast email")
    # invididual email, only Mary gets it
    my_emailer.individual_email("[e-mail]", "This is an individual email")

The full script is only 40 lines of simple code and can be found here for reference.

I hope you like it. Let's try it out and shoot your friend an email 📧 by Python!