Making an email function in Python

Question

I'm working on a project right now that requires the capability to send emails. My problem is that whenever I put the emailing code into a function, it stops working.

Here's the function (excluding the actual email and password information of course):

import smtplib, ssl

port = 465
smtp_server = "smtp.gmail.com"
sender_email = "my_email@gmail.com"
receiver_email = "their_email@gmail.com"
password = "password"
message = """\
    Subject: Subject

    This is the email body"""

def send(msg):

    context = ssl.create_default_context()
    with smtplib.SMTP_SSL(smtp_server, port, context=context) as server:
        server.login(sender_email, password)
        server.sendmail(sender_email, receiver_email, msg)
        print("SENT")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    send(message)

this doesn't even give me errors, it just doesn't work. However, if I do it like this, everything works fine:

import smtplib, ssl

port = 465
smtp_server = "smtp.gmail.com"
sender_email = "my_email@gmail.com"
receiver_email = "their_email@gmail.com"
password = "password"
message = """\
Subject: Subject

This is the email body"""

context = ssl.create_default_context()
with smtplib.SMTP_SSL(smtp_server, port, context=context) as server:
    server.login(sender_email, password)
    server.sendmail(sender_email, receiver_email, message)
    print("SENT")

Any thoughts on why this is happening?

Answer 1

The only difference I can see is the whitespace before your subject line in the email's contents. Try removing it such that your snippet is as follows:

import smtplib, ssl

port = 465
smtp_server = "smtp.gmail.com"
sender_email = "my_email@gmail.com"
receiver_email = "their_email@gmail.com"
password = "password"
message = """\
Subject: Subject

This is the email body"""

def send(msg):

    context = ssl.create_default_context()
    with smtplib.SMTP_SSL(smtp_server, port, context=context) as server:
        server.login(sender_email, password)
        server.sendmail(sender_email, receiver_email, msg)
        print("SENT")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    send(message)

Seeing as this is the only real difference in your two snippets, this is my best idea as to what is going wrong.