Generating and saving an .eml file with python 3.3

Question

I am trying to generate emails using the standard email library and save them as .eml files. I must not be understanding how email.generator works because I keep getting the error 'AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'write.' ``` from email import generator from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart from email.mime.text import MIMEText active_dir = 'c:\' class Gen_Emails(object): def __init__(self): self.EmailGen() def EmailGen(self): sender = 'sender' recepiant = 'recipiant' subject = 'subject' msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative') msg['Subject'] = subject msg['From'] = sender msg['To'] = recepiant html = """\

hello world

""" part = MIMEText(html, 'html') msg.attach(part) self.SaveToFile(msg) def SaveToFile(self,msg): out_file = active_dir gen = generator.Generator(out_file) gen.flatten(msg) ``` Any ideas?

Accepted Answer

You are supposed to pass an open file (in write mode) to `Generator()`. Currently you pass it just a string, which is why it fails when it tries to call `.write()` on the string.

So do something like this:

```
import os
cwd = os.getcwd()
outfile_name = os.path.join(cwd, 'message.eml')

class Gen_Emails(object):

# ...

def SaveToFile(self,msg):
        with open(outfile_name, 'w') as outfile:
            gen = generator.Generator(outfile)
            gen.flatten(msg)
```

Note: `with open(outfile_name, 'w') as outfile` opens the file at the path `outfile_name` in write mode and assigns the file pointer to the open file to `outfile`. The context manager also takes care of closing the file for you after you exit the `with` block.

`os.path.join()` will join paths in a cross-plattform way, which is why you should prefer it over concatenating paths by hand.

`os.getcwd()` will return your current working directory. If you want to your file to be saved somewhere else just change it out accordingly.

Generating and saving an .eml file with python 3.3

Solution

Problem