How to send email via Django?

Question

In my settings.py, I have the following:

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'

# Host for sending e-mail.
EMAIL_HOST = 'localhost'

# Port for sending e-mail.
EMAIL_PORT = 1025

# Optional SMTP authentication information for EMAIL_HOST.
EMAIL_HOST_USER = ''
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = ''
EMAIL_USE_TLS = False

My email code:

from django.core.mail import EmailMessage
email = EmailMessage('Hello', 'World', to=['[email protected]'])
email.send()

Of course, if I setup a debugging server via python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025, I can see the email in my terminal.

However, how do I actually send the email not to the debugging server but to [email protected]?

After reading your answers, let me get something straight:

1. Can't you use localhost(simple ubuntu pc) to send e-mails?

2. I thought in django 1.3 send_mail() is somewhat deprecated and EmailMessage.send() is used instead?

Meadowsweet

1. You can use localhost if you have a SMTP server running there. 2. The exact mechanism is unimportant. The important part is that you have a SMTP server. – Gloria

so if I install postfix, I can send/receive emails? How do you set up postfix to do this? – Meadowsweet

That question is beyond the scope of this site. – Gloria

https://mcmap.net/q/137808/-django-sending-email – Clive

Yet SEO takes us to this page, Ignacio. – Propound

This video explains very nicely all the steps needed. – Extravascular

Don't think that using a third party service is the correct answer. It is not. You can install a MTA like sendmail which will allow you to send email locally. – Wingspread

Answer 1

Send the email to a real SMTP server. If you don't want to set up your own then you can find companies that will run one for you, such as Google themselves.

Gloria

Awesome, I just myself an email! The above article mentioned by miku was perfect. Note the small typo correction in the comments of the article. (And I just used my regular computer/localhost. I had not set anything else up before hand.) – Promisee

Which article? Could you link it again? – Danged

Answer 2

I use Gmail as my SMTP server for Django. Much easier than dealing with postfix or whatever other server. I'm not in the business of managing email servers.

In settings.py:

EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.gmail.com'
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_HOST_USER = '[email protected]'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'password'

NOTE: In 2016 Gmail is not allowing this anymore by default. You can either use an external service like Sendgrid, or you can follow this tutorial from Google to reduce security but allow this option: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6010255

Flanigan

is there an alternative to leaving your password as a plaintext? – Sennacherib

You could use an email service like Mandrill that will let you use a passphrase instead, although I'm not sure that's any more helpful for you. You could also use an encryption key that's installed on your server, and make the line something like EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = my_decrypt('abi304hubaushl9rchy2y9fd29') – Flanigan

put it in an environment variable. Then, EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = os.environ['MY_PASSWORD_THAT_YOU_CANT_KNOW'] – Pucida

I used the your code verbatim. My gmail account has been blocked after a few days. My server probably sent less than 20 emails per day. Had anyone had a similar issue with google? – Micrometer

On a new account, maybe. You could also try using a service like Mandrill. It's basically the same, if you follow their SMTP instructions. – Flanigan

SMTPAuthenticationError and I get an email "Sign-in attempt prevented ... from an app that doesn't meet modern security standards". Looks like this. Workaround by "turning on access for less secure apps". And that worked. – Luker

Limited FROM address (3rd parameter to send_mail(). It can only be an email associated with your gmail account. – Luker

Is there any alternative to Sendgrid. Please suggest as I'm using subdomain of pythonanywhere.com. – Veneaux

Is there a statement from Google saying that SMTP is disabled for personal/free accounts? This answer says Gmail is no longer allowing SMTP in 2016, but I can confirm the SMTP works just fine with Google Apps for Business if you enable it in the Gmail App settings and use an app token for the password of the user you want to send from. – Montespan

Answer 3

1. Create a project: django-admin.py startproject gmail

2. Edit settings.py with code below:

   EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
   EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
   EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.gmail.com'
   EMAIL_HOST_USER = '[email protected]'
   EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'email_password'
   EMAIL_PORT = 587
   

3. Run interactive mode: python manage.py shell

4. Import the EmailMessage module:

   from django.core.mail import EmailMessage
   

5. Send the email:

   email = EmailMessage('Subject', 'Body', to=['[email protected]'])
   email.send()
   

For more informations, check send_mail and EmailMessage features in documents.

UPDATE for Gmail

Also if you have problems sending email via gmail remember to check this guides from google.

In your Google account settings, go to Security > Account permissions > Access for less secure apps and enable this option.

Also create an App specific password for your gmail after you've turned on 2-step-verification for it.

Then you should use app specific password in settings. So change the following line:

    EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'your_email_app_specific_password'

Also if you're interested to send HTML email, check this out.

Selfconceit

I follow your steps, I can not send, the to email do not receive email/ – Ergot

what will be EMAIL_HOST for outlookoffice365 ? – Hottentot

Answer 4

My site is hosted on Godaddy and I have a private email registered on the same. These are the settings which worked for me:

In settings.py:

EMAIL_HOST = 'mail.domain.com'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = '[email protected]'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'abcdef'
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = '[email protected]'
SERVER_EMAIL = '[email protected]'
EMAIL_PORT = 25
EMAIL_USE_TLS = False

In shell:

from django.core.mail import EmailMessage
email = EmailMessage('Subject', 'Body', to=['[email protected]'])
email.send()

Then I got "1" as the O/P i.e. Success. And I received the mail too. :)

• What is the meaning of domain.com?

Grubbs

Thanks, that's the easiest way for old projects < Django 1.4 – Lactam

Answer 5

For Django version 1.7, if above solutions dont work then try the following

in settings.py add

#For email
EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'

EMAIL_USE_TLS = True

EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.gmail.com'

EMAIL_HOST_USER = '[email protected]'

#Must generate specific password for your app in [gmail settings][1]
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'app_specific_password'

EMAIL_PORT = 587

#This did the trick
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = EMAIL_HOST_USER

The last line did the trick for django 1.7

Delossantos

This one didn't work for me for some reason. I kept getting back an error with the password being wrong. Which is strange because i got the credentials direct from Mailgun. – Tunnel

Answer 6

You need to use smtp as backend in settings.py

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'

If you use backend as console, you will receive output in console

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'

And also below settings in addition

EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.gmail.com'
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_HOST_USER = '[email protected]'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'password'

If you are using gmail for this, setup 2-step verification and Application specific password and copy and paste that password in above EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD value.

Pescara

Answer 7

I found using SendGrid to be the easiest way to set up sending email with Django. Here's how it works:

1. Create a SendGrid account (and verify your email)
2. Add the following to your settings.py: EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.sendgrid.net' EMAIL_HOST_USER = '<your sendgrid username>' EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = '<your sendgrid password>' EMAIL_PORT = 587 EMAIL_USE_TLS = True

And you're all set!

To send email:

from django.core.mail import send_mail
send_mail('<Your subject>', '<Your message>', '[email protected]', ['[email protected]'])

If you want Django to email you whenever there's a 500 internal server error, add the following to your settings.py:

DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = '[email protected]'
ADMINS = [('<Your name>', '[email protected]')]

Sending email with SendGrid is free up to 12k emails per month.

Fausta

Excellent, but haven't able to get it to work using 'apikey' as username as per documentation, and SendGrid list three dozens permission configurations per apikey for a simple sendmail... – Morpheme

Answer 8

You could use "Test Mail Server Tool" to test email sending on your machine or localhost. Google and Download "Test Mail Server Tool" and set it up.

Then in your settings.py:

EMAIL_BACKEND= 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_HOST = 'localhost'
EMAIL_PORT = 25

From shell:

from django.core.mail import send_mail
send_mail('subject','message','sender email',['receipient email'],    fail_silently=False)

Allyson

Answer 9

I had actually done this from Django a while back. Open up a legitimate GMail account & enter the credentials here. Here's my code -

from email import Encoders
from email.MIMEBase import MIMEBase
from email.MIMEText import MIMEText
from email.MIMEMultipart import MIMEMultipart

def sendmail(to, subject, text, attach=[], mtype='html'):
    ok = True
    gmail_user = settings.EMAIL_HOST_USER
    gmail_pwd  = settings.EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD

    msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative')

    msg['From']    = gmail_user
    msg['To']      = to
    msg['Cc']      = '[email protected]'
    msg['Subject'] = subject

    msg.attach(MIMEText(text, mtype))

    for a in attach:
        part = MIMEBase('application', 'octet-stream')
        part.set_payload(open(attach, 'rb').read())
        Encoders.encode_base64(part)
        part.add_header('Content-Disposition','attachment; filename="%s"' % os.path.basename(a))
        msg.attach(part)

    try:
        mailServer = smtplib.SMTP("smtp.gmail.com", 687)
        mailServer.ehlo()
        mailServer.starttls()
        mailServer.ehlo()
        mailServer.login(gmail_user, gmail_pwd)
        mailServer.sendmail(gmail_user, [to,msg['Cc']], msg.as_string())
        mailServer.close()
    except:
        ok = False
    return ok

Kerbstone

There's no need to use smtplib directly; Django will handle that part for you. – Gloria

oh is it! how would that be? Here I entirely bypass the default django send_mailfunction & use my own... – Kerbstone

send_mail() is how you would do it. You still need to assemble the message yourself, but you don't have to worry about the SMTP bits. – Gloria

Answer 10

Late, but:

In addition to the DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL fix others have mentioned, and allowing less-secure apps to access the account, I had to navigate to https://accounts.google.com/DisplayUnlockCaptcha while signed in as the account in question to get Django to finally authenticate.

I went to that URL through a SSH tunnel to the web server to make sure the IP address was the same; I'm not totally sure if that's necessary but it can't hurt. You can do that like so: ssh -D 8080 -fN <username>@<host>, then set your web browser to use localhost:8080 as a SOCKS proxy.

Doukhobor

Answer 11

For SendGrid - Django Specifically:

SendGrid Django Docs here

Set these variables in

settings.py

EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.sendgrid.net'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'sendgrid_username'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'sendgrid_password'
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True

in views.py

from django.core.mail import send_mail
send_mail('Subject here', 'Here is the message.', '[email protected]', ['[email protected]'], fail_silently=False)

Asomatous

Documentation and set up have changed since then but the link to the documentation still works and takes you to the correct config. – False

Answer 12

below formate worked for me

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'

EMAIL_USE_TLS = True EMAIL_HOST = 'mail.xxxxxxx.xxx'

EMAIL_PORT = 465

EMAIL_HOST_USER = '[email protected]'

EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'xxxxxxx'

Pierson

how come this is the useful answer and different than others – Laniary

Answer 13

In settings.py configure the email as following

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.gmail.com'
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
EMAIL_HOST_USER = '[email protected]'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'password'

In most of the cases Gmail settings is missed out. Make sure that the less secure app access is turned on. You can also check the procedure here

Then send email within views from django.core.mail import send_mail

def send(request):
    send_mail(
        ‘Email Subject here’,
        ‘Email content’,
        settings.EMAIL_HOST_USER,
        [‘[email protected]’],
        fail_silently=False)

Skycap

While this link may answer the question, it is better to include the essential parts of the answer here and provide the link for reference. Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes. – Papageno