How to send email from a Python script

Today I needed to send email from a Python script. As always I searched Google and found the following script that fits to my need.

import smtplib

SERVER = "localhost"

FROM = "sender@example.com"
TO = ["user@example.com"] # must be a list

SUBJECT = "Hello!"

TEXT = "This message was sent with Python's smtplib."

# Prepare actual message

message = """\
From: %s
To: %s
Subject: %s

%s
""" % (FROM, ", ".join(TO), SUBJECT, TEXT)

# Send the mail

server = smtplib.SMTP(SERVER)
server.sendmail(FROM, TO, message)
server.quit()

[Source: http://effbot.org/pyfaq/how-do-i-send-mail-from-a-python-script.htm]

But when I tried to run the program, I got the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "email.py", line 1, in 
import smtplib
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/smtplib.py", line 46, in 
import email.Utils
File "/home/dsebd/email.py", line 24, in 
server = smtplib.SMTP(SERVER)
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'SMTP'

I got rid of the problem when I renamed the file email.py to another file!

Can anyone explain the reason?

Update [21 August 2011]
If you want to use it as function you can use the following code:

import smtplib

def send_email(sender, receiver, subject, body):
    msg = ("From: %s\r\nTo: %s\r\nSubject: %s\r\n\r\n%s" 
        %(sender, receiver, subject, body))
    s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
    s.sendmail(sender, [receiver], msg)
    s.quit()

You should also check this link for more examples (won't work in older version of python like 2.4.x): http://docs.python.org/library/email-examples.html