How to Email a Django FileField as an Attachment?

Question

I need to send a models.FileField as an email attachment using Django. I've seen snippets that show how to do this with the raw request.FILES data (which still contains the Content-Type), but have not been able to find anything that shows how to do it once you've already saved the file in a models.FileField. The content type seems to be inaccessible from the models.FileField.

Can someone give me an example of how this would work? I'm beginning to think that I might have to store the Content-Type in the model when I save the file.

Thanks!

Could you provide the solution you found as an answer? I'd like to see the snippet too. — Doppelganger, Nov 03 '11 at 19:43

score 19 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 21 '11 at 22:23

Attaching a models.FileField file to an email message is nice and simple in Django:

from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
kwargs = dict(
    to=to,
    from_email=from_addr,
    subject=subject,
    body=text_content,
    alternatives=((html_content, 'text/html'),)
)
message = EmailMultiAlternatives(**kwargs)
message.attach_file(model_instance.filefield.path)
message.send()

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 30 '19 at 07:42

7

I am using django-storages and so .path raises

NotImplementedError: This backend doesn't support absolute paths.

To avoid this, I simply open the file, read it, guess the mimetype and close it later, but having to use .attach instead of .attach_file magic.

from mimetypes import guess_type
from os.path import basename


f = model.filefield
f.open()
# msg.attach(filename, content, mimetype)
msg.attach(basename(f.name), f.read(), guess_type(f.name)[0])
f.close()

answered Jan 30 '19 at 07:42

shad0w_wa1k3r

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It seems odd that the django mail module doesn't provide a better interface to the storage backend. This is the safest answer to work with multiple backends and is the one you need if you aren't using a filesystem backend. The question asked is how to email a django filefield as an attachment, but the answers that depend on the file being on a filesystem storage are really just answering the question for that filesystem storage backend configuration. – Jmills Jan 13 '21 at 01:45

Tom · Answer 3 · 2020-03-05T16:08:12.160

6

Another approach:

from django.core.mail.message import EmailMessage

msg = EmailMessage(subject=my_subject, body=my_email_body, 
      from_email=settings.DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL, to=[to_addressed])
msg.attach_file(self.my_filefield.path) # self.my_filefield.file for Django < 1.7
msg.send(fail_silently=not(settings.DEBUG))

edited Mar 05 '20 at 16:08

answered Jun 13 '12 at 16:33

Tom

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I had to use `msg.attach_file(self.my_filefield.path)` with Django 1.7.1 – sspross Mar 30 '15 at 09:24

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:32

I would just not supply a content type and let the recipient's email client work it out. Unless it will be something unusual it shouldn't be a problem.

RFC2616 states:

If and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the resource.

but... If you want to specify it then storing the content type on upload is a very good idea. It should be noted that django's own docs say to verify the data from users

If you are on a *unix OS you could try to guess/inspect it:

import subprocess
subprocess.check_output(['file', '-b', '--mime', filename])

(from How to find the mime type of a file in python? )

Thanks! I'll give this a go and report back! – Lyle Pratt Jun 28 '11 at 15:41 — Lyle Pratt, Jun 28 '11 at 15:41

How to Email a Django FileField as an Attachment?

4 Answers4