Sending E-Mail From the AS/400

The AS/400 has some reasonably good e-mail facilities built-in, however there are times when it's still easier to be able to send e-mail from within Python, particularly when you have to use any kind of custom formatting that exploits Python's strengths.

The module listed below will send an HTML formatted e-mail (no specific HTML formatting included, that's part of the "text" spec) to the specified address. Be sure that the "sender" address is at least a valid domain for your e-mail server, otherwise the server may reject it.

To use this module, you would simply call:

SendEmail('myname@mydomain.com','AS400 <test@mydomain.com>','Hey, it works!','Message body here!')

Here's the module:

• def SendEmail( recipient = 'webmaster@yourdomain.com',\
                 sender    = 'Automated Update <webmaster@yourdomain.com>',\
                 subject   = 'no subject',\
                 text      = 'No Message Text Specified'):
  

      #
      # Send an e-mail
      #

      maildate = time.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S",time.localtime(time.time()))
      output   = StringIO()
      message  = MimeWriter.MimeWriter(output)
   
      message.addheader("To", recipient)
      message.addheader("From", sender)
      message.addheader("Subject", subject)
      message.addheader("Date", maildate)
      message.addheader("MIME-Version","1.0")
      message.startmultipartbody("alternative")
   
      instructions = message.nextpart()
      instructions.addheader("Content-Transfer-Encoding","quoted-printable")
      instructions.flushheaders()
      mailfile = instructions.startbody("text/html")
   

      #
      # Here we have to do our own "Quoted-Printable" encoding
      # due to a bug in the QUOPRI module that can't properly
      # compensate for the EBCDIC to ASCII conversion
      #

      text = binascii.b2a_qp(text.encode('ascii'))
      text = text.decode('ascii')
   
      mailfile.write(text)
      message.lastpart()
      ftext = output.getvalue()
   

      #
      # SEND THE E-MAIL TO THE DEFINED SERVER
      #

      serverip = "myserver.iporname.com"
      server   = smtplib.SMTP(serverip)
      server.set_debuglevel(0)
      server.sendmail(sender, recipient, ftext)
      server.quit()
   
      return