The prefect-email library helps you send emails from your Prefect flows.

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Getting started

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Prerequisites

  • Many email services, such as Gmail, require an App Password to successfully send emails. If you encounter an error similar to smtplib.SMTPAuthenticationError: (535, b'5.7.8 Username and Password not accepted..., it’s likely you are not using an App Password.

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Install prefect-email

The following command will install a version of prefect-email compatible with your installed version of Prefect. If you don’t already have Prefect installed, it will install the newest version of Prefect as well.

pip install "prefect[email]"

Upgrade to the latest versions of Prefect and prefect-email:

pip install -U "prefect[email]"

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Register newly installed block types

Register the block types in the prefect-email module to make them available for use.

prefect block register -m prefect_email

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Save credentials to an EmailServerCredentials block

Save your email credentials to a block. Replace the placeholders with your email address and password.

from prefect_email import EmailServerCredentials


credentials = EmailServerCredentials(
    username="EMAIL-ADDRESS-PLACEHOLDER",
    password="PASSWORD-PLACEHOLDER",  # must be an application password
)
credentials.save("BLOCK-NAME-PLACEHOLDER")

In the examples below you load a credentials block to authenticate with the email server.

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Send emails

The code below shows how to send an email using the pre-built email_send_message task.

from prefect import flow
from prefect_email import EmailServerCredentials, email_send_message


@flow
def example_email_send_message_flow(email_addresses):
    email_server_credentials = EmailServerCredentials.load("BLOCK-NAME-PLACEHOLDER")
    for email_address in email_addresses:
        subject = email_send_message.with_options(name=f"email {email_address}").submit(
            email_server_credentials=email_server_credentials,
            subject="Example Flow Notification using Gmail",
            msg="This proves email_send_message works!",
            email_to=email_address,
        )


if __name__ == "__main__":
    example_email_send_message_flow(["EMAIL-ADDRESS-PLACEHOLDER"])

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Capture exceptions and send an email

This example demonstrates how to send an email notification with the details of the exception when a flow run fails.

prefect-email can be wrapped in an except statement to do just that!

from prefect import flow
from prefect.context import get_run_context
from prefect_email import EmailServerCredentials, email_send_message


def notify_exc_by_email(exc):
    context = get_run_context()
    flow_run_name = context.flow_run.name
    email_server_credentials = EmailServerCredentials.load("email-server-credentials")
    email_send_message(
        email_server_credentials=email_server_credentials,
        subject=f"Flow run {flow_run_name!r} failed",
        msg=f"Flow run {flow_run_name!r} failed due to {exc}.",
        email_to=email_server_credentials.username,
    )

@flow
def example_flow():
    try:
        1 / 0
    except Exception as exc:
        notify_exc_by_email(exc)
        raise


if __name__ == "__main__":
    example_flow()

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Resources

Refer to the prefect-email SDK documentation linked in the sidebar to explore all the capabilities of the prefect-email library.

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