Sending Verizon SMS message via Python and smtplib

Question

I can make smtplib send to other email addresses, but for some reason it is not delivering to my phone.

import smtplib
msg = 'test'
server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com',587)  
server.starttls()  
server.login("<username>","<password>")  
server.sendmail(username, "<number>@vtext.com", msg)  
server.quit()

The message sends successfully when the address is a gmail account, and sending a message to the phone using the native gmail interface works perfectly. What is different with SMS message numbers?

Note: using set_debuglevel() I can tell that smtplib believes the message to be successful, so I am fairly confident the discrepancy has something to do with the behavior of vtext numbers.

Answer 1

The email is being rejected because it doesn't look an email (there aren't any To From or Subject fields)

This works:

import smtplib

username = "account@gmail.com"
password = "password"

vtext = "1112223333@vtext.com"
message = "this is the message to be sent"

msg = """From: %s
To: %s
Subject: text-message
%s""" % (username, vtext, message)

server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com',587)
server.starttls()
server.login(username,password)
server.sendmail(username, vtext, msg)
server.quit()

Answer 2

The accepted answer didn't work for me with Python 3.3.3. I had to use MIMEText also:

import smtplib
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

username = "account@gmail.com"
password = "password"

vtext = "1112223333@vtext.com"
message = "this is the message to be sent"

msg = MIMEText("""From: %s
To: %s
Subject: text-message
%s""" % (username, vtext, message))

server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com',587)
# server.starttls()
server.login(username,password)
server.sendmail(username, vtext, msg.as_string())
server.quit()