Send anonymous mail from local machine

Question

I was using Python for sending an email using an external SMTP server. In the code below, I tried using smtp.gmail.com to send an email from a gmail id to some other id. I was able to produce the output with the code below.

import smtplib
from email.MIMEText import MIMEText
import socket


socket.setdefaulttimeout(None)
HOST = "smtp.gmail.com"
PORT = "587"
sender= "[email protected]"
password = "pass"
receiver= "[email protected]"

msg = MIMEText("Hello World")

msg['Subject'] = 'Subject - Hello World'
msg['From'] = sender
msg['To'] = receiver

server = smtplib.SMTP()
server.connect(HOST, PORT)
server.starttls()
server.login(sender,password)
server.sendmail(sender,receiver, msg.as_string())
server.close()

But I have to do the same without the help of an external SMTP server. How can do the same with Python?
Please help.

Answer 1

The best way to achieve this is understand the Fake SMTP code it uses the great smtpd module.

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""A noddy fake smtp server."""

import smtpd
import asyncore

class FakeSMTPServer(smtpd.SMTPServer):
    """A Fake smtp server"""

    def __init__(*args, **kwargs):
        print "Running fake smtp server on port 25"
        smtpd.SMTPServer.__init__(*args, **kwargs)

    def process_message(*args, **kwargs):
        pass

if __name__ == "__main__":
    smtp_server = FakeSMTPServer(('localhost', 25), None)
    try:
        asyncore.loop()
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        smtp_server.close()

To use this, save the above as fake_stmp.py and:

chmod +x fake_smtp.py
sudo ./fake_smtp.py

If you really want to go into more details, then I suggest that you understand the source code of that module.

If that doesn't work try the smtplib:

import smtplib

SERVER = "localhost"

FROM = "[email protected]"
TO = ["[email protected]"] # must be a list

SUBJECT = "Hello!"

TEXT = "This message was sent with Python's smtplib."

# Prepare actual message

message = """\
From: %s
To: %s
Subject: %s

%s
""" % (FROM, ", ".join(TO), SUBJECT, TEXT)

# Send the mail

server = smtplib.SMTP(SERVER)
server.sendmail(FROM, TO, message)
server.quit()