Binary file email attachment problem

[Alan Harris-Reid]

Hi there,

Using Python 3.1.2 I am having a problem sending binary attachment files
(jpeg, pdf, etc.) - MIMEText attachments work fine. The code in question
is as follows...

for file in self.attachments:
part = MIMEBase('application', "octet-stream")
part.set_payload(open(file,"rb").read())
encoders.encode_base64(part)
part.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment; filename="%s"' %
file)
msg.attach(part) # msg is an instance of MIMEMultipart()

server = smtplib.SMTP(host, port)
server.login(username, password)
server.sendmail(from_addr, all_recipients, msg.as_string())

However, way down in the calling-stack (see traceback below), it looks
as though msg.as_string() has received an attachment which creates a
payload of 'bytes' type instead of string. I suspect the error lies in
the encoding somewhere, but I've no idea where. I have also tried
MIMEApplication and MIMEImage, but the error still remains. I have seen
many similar code examples on the web, all of which fail for me, so I
wonder if there is something wrong with my environment.

Has anyone any idea what might be causing the problem? Any help would be
appreciated.

Alan

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builtins.TypeError: string payload expected: <class 'bytes'>
File "c:\Dev\CommonPY\Scripts\email_send.py", line 147, in send
server.sendmail(self.from_addr, all_recipients, msg.as_string())
File "c:\Program Files\Python31\Lib\email\message.py", line 136, in
as_string
g.flatten(self, unixfrom=unixfrom)
File "c:\Program Files\Python31\Lib\email\generator.py", line 76, in flatten
self._write(msg)
File "c:\Program Files\Python31\Lib\email\generator.py", line 101, in _write
self._dispatch(msg)
File "c:\Program Files\Python31\Lib\email\generator.py", line 127, in
_dispatch
meth(msg)
File "c:\Program Files\Python31\Lib\email\generator.py", line 181, in
_handle_multipart
g.flatten(part, unixfrom=False)
File "c:\Program Files\Python31\Lib\email\generator.py", line 76, in flatten
self._write(msg)
File "c:\Program Files\Python31\Lib\email\generator.py", line 101, in _write
self._dispatch(msg)
File "c:\Program Files\Python31\Lib\email\generator.py", line 127, in
_dispatch
meth(msg)
File "c:\Program Files\Python31\Lib\email\generator.py", line 155, in
_handle_text
raise TypeError('string payload expected: %s' % type(payload))

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