invoke user's standard mail client

[luc.saffre at gmail.com]

Hello,

the simplest way to launch the user's standard mail client from a
Python program is by creating a mailto: URL and launching the
webbrowser:

def mailto_url(to=None,subject=None,body=None,cc=None):
    """
    encodes the content as a mailto link as described on
    http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2368.html
    Examples partly taken from
    http://selfhtml.teamone.de/html/verweise/email.htm
    """
    url = "mailto:" + urllib.quote(to.strip(),"@,")
    sep = "?"
    if cc:
        url+= sep + "cc=" + urllib.quote(cc,"@,")
        sep = "&"
    if subject:
        url+= sep + "subject=" + urllib.quote(subject,"")
        sep = "&"
    if body:
        # Also note that line breaks in the body of a message MUST be
        # encoded with "%0D%0A". (RFC 2368)
        body="\r\n".join(body.splitlines())
        url+= sep + "body=" + urllib.quote(body,"")
        sep = "&"
    return url

import webbrowser
url = mailto_url(...)
webbrowser.open(url,new=1)

(Excerpt from http://svn.berlios.de/wsvn/lino/trunk/src/lino/tools/mail.py?op=file&rev=0&sc=0)

But this method is limited: you cannot specify a file to be attached
to the mail. And I guess that there would be problems if the body text
is too complex.

Does somebody know about a better method?
It should be possible at least on Windows, since Acrobat Reader is
able to do it.

Thanks in advance for any hints!
Luc Saffre