I need for testing purposes to populate few hundred email boxes with various messages, and was going to use smtplib for that. But among other things I need to be able to send messages not only TO specific mailboxes, but CC and BCC them as well. It does not look like smtplib supports CC-ing and BCC-ing while sending emails.

Looking for suggestions how to do CC or BCC sending messages from the python script.

(And — no, I'm not creating a script to spam anyone outside of my testing environment.)

Email headers don't matter to the smtp server. Just add CC and BCC recipients to toaddrs when sending emails. For CC, add them to the CC header.

toaddr = 'buffy@sunnydale.k12.ca.us'
cc = ['alexander@sunydale.k12.ca.us','willow@sunnydale.k12.ca.us']
bcc = ['chairman@slayerscouncil.uk']
fromaddr = 'giles@sunnydale.k12.ca.us'
message_subject = "disturbance in sector 7"
message_text = "Three are dead in an attack in the sewers below sector 7."
message = "From: %s\r\n" % fromaddr
        + "To: %s\r\n" % toaddr
        + "CC: %s\r\n" % ",".join(cc)
        + "Subject: %s\r\n" % message_subject
        + "\r\n" 
        + message_text
toaddrs = [toaddr] + cc + bcc
server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.sunnydale.k12.ca.us')
server.set_debuglevel(1)
server.sendmail(fromaddr, toaddrs, message)
server.quit()