Quick example¶

In two lines:

from django.core.mail import send_mail

send_mail(
    'Subject here',
    'Here is the message.',
    '[email protected]',
    ['[email protected]'],
    fail_silently=False,
)

Mail is sent using the SMTP host and port specified in the EMAIL_HOST and EMAIL_PORT settings. The EMAIL_HOST_USER and EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD settings, if set, are used to authenticate to the SMTP server, and the EMAIL_USE_TLS and EMAIL_USE_SSL settings control whether a secure connection is used.

send_mail()¶

send_mail(subject, message, from_email, recipient_list, fail_silently=False, auth_user=None, auth_password=None, connection=None, html_message=None)[source]¶

The simplest way to send email is using django.core.mail.send_mail().

The subject, message, from_email and recipient_list parameters are required.

• subject: A string.
• message: A string.
• from_email: A string.
• recipient_list: A list of strings, each an email address. Each member of recipient_list will see the other recipients in the “To:” field of the email message.
• fail_silently: A boolean. If it’s False, send_mail will raise an smtplib.SMTPException. See the smtplib docs for a list of possible exceptions, all of which are subclasses of SMTPException.
• auth_user: The optional username to use to authenticate to the SMTP server. If this isn’t provided, Django will use the value of the EMAIL_HOST_USER setting.
• auth_password: The optional password to use to authenticate to the SMTP server. If this isn’t provided, Django will use the value of the EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD setting.
• connection: The optional email backend to use to send the mail. If unspecified, an instance of the default backend will be used. See the documentation on Email backends for more details.
• html_message: If html_message is provided, the resulting email will be a multipart/alternative email with message as the text/plain content type and html_message as the text/html content type.

The return value will be the number of successfully delivered messages (which can be 0 or 1 since it can only send one message).

send_mass_mail()¶

send_mass_mail(datatuple, fail_silently=False, auth_user=None, auth_password=None, connection=None)[source]¶

django.core.mail.send_mass_mail() is intended to handle mass emailing.

datatuple is a tuple in which each element is in this format:

(subject, message, from_email, recipient_list)

fail_silently, auth_user and auth_password have the same functions as in send_mail().

Each separate element of datatuple results in a separate email message. As in send_mail(), recipients in the same recipient_list will all see the other addresses in the email messages’ “To:” field.

For example, the following code would send two different messages to two different sets of recipients; however, only one connection to the mail server would be opened:

message1 = ('Subject here', 'Here is the message', '[email protected]', ['[email protected]', '[email protected]'])
message2 = ('Another Subject', 'Here is another message', '[email protected]', ['[email protected]'])
send_mass_mail((message1, message2), fail_silently=False)

The return value will be the number of successfully delivered messages.

mail_admins()¶

mail_admins(subject, message, fail_silently=False, connection=None, html_message=None)[source]¶

django.core.mail.mail_admins() is a shortcut for sending an email to the site admins, as defined in the ADMINS setting.

mail_admins() prefixes the subject with the value of the EMAIL_SUBJECT_PREFIX setting, which is "[Django] " by default.

The “From:” header of the email will be the value of the SERVER_EMAIL setting.

This method exists for convenience and readability.

If html_message is provided, the resulting email will be a multipart/alternative email with message as the text/plain content type and html_message as the text/html content type.

mail_managers()¶

mail_managers(subject, message, fail_silently=False, connection=None, html_message=None)[source]¶

django.core.mail.mail_managers() is just like mail_admins(), except it sends an email to the site managers, as defined in the MANAGERS setting.

Examples¶

This sends a single email to john@example.com and jane@example.com, with them both appearing in the “To:”:

send_mail(
    'Subject',
    'Message.',
    '[email protected]',
    ['[email protected]', '[email protected]'],
)

This sends a message to john@example.com and jane@example.com, with them both receiving a separate email:

datatuple = (
    ('Subject', 'Message.', '[email protected]', ['[email protected]']),
    ('Subject', 'Message.', '[email protected]', ['[email protected]']),
)
send_mass_mail(datatuple)

Preventing header injection¶

Header injection is a security exploit in which an attacker inserts extra email headers to control the “To:” and “From:” in email messages that your scripts generate.

The Django email functions outlined above all protect against header injection by forbidding newlines in header values. If any subject, from_email or recipient_list contains a newline (in either Unix, Windows or Mac style), the email function (e.g. send_mail()) will raise django.core.mail.BadHeaderError (a subclass of ValueError) and, hence, will not send the email. It’s your responsibility to validate all data before passing it to the email functions.

If a message contains headers at the start of the string, the headers will simply be printed as the first bit of the email message.

Here’s an example view that takes a subject, message and from_email from the request’s POST data, sends that to admin@example.com and redirects to “/contact/thanks/” when it’s done:

from django.core.mail import send_mail, BadHeaderError
from django.http import HttpResponse, HttpResponseRedirect

def send_email(request):
    subject = request.POST.get('subject', '')
    message = request.POST.get('message', '')
    from_email = request.POST.get('from_email', '')
    if subject and message and from_email:
        try:
            send_mail(subject, message, from_email, ['[email protected]'])
        except BadHeaderError:
            return HttpResponse('Invalid header found.')
        return HttpResponseRedirect('/contact/thanks/')
    else:
        # In reality we'd use a form class
        # to get proper validation errors.
        return HttpResponse('Make sure all fields are entered and valid.')

The EmailMessage class¶

Django’s send_mail() and send_mass_mail() functions are actually thin wrappers that make use of the EmailMessage class.

Not all features of the EmailMessage class are available through the send_mail() and related wrapper functions. If you wish to use advanced features, such as BCC’ed recipients, file attachments, or multi-part email, you’ll need to create EmailMessage instances directly.

EmailMessage is responsible for creating the email message itself. The email backend is then responsible for sending the email.

For convenience, EmailMessage provides a simple send() method for sending a single email. If you need to send multiple messages, the email backend API provides an alternative.

from django.core.mail import EmailMessage

email = EmailMessage(
    'Hello',
    'Body goes here',
    '[email protected]',
    ['[email protected]', '[email protected]'],
    ['[email protected]'],
    reply_to=['[email protected]'],
    headers={'Message-ID': 'foo'},
)

from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives

subject, from_email, to = 'hello', '[email protected]', '[email protected]'
text_content = 'This is an important message.'
html_content = '<p>This is an <strong>important</strong> message.</p>'
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, text_content, from_email, [to])
msg.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
msg.send()

msg = EmailMessage(subject, html_content, from_email, [to])
msg.content_subtype = "html"  # Main content is now text/html
msg.send()

Email backends¶

The actual sending of an email is handled by the email backend.

The email backend class has the following methods:

• open() instantiates a long-lived email-sending connection.
• close() closes the current email-sending connection.
• send_messages(email_messages) sends a list of EmailMessage objects. If the connection is not open, this call will implicitly open the connection, and close the connection afterwards. If the connection is already open, it will be left open after mail has been sent.

It can also be used as a context manager, which will automatically call open() and close() as needed:

from django.core import mail

with mail.get_connection() as connection:
    mail.EmailMessage(
        subject1, body1, from1, [to1],
        connection=connection,
    ).send()
    mail.EmailMessage(
        subject2, body2, from2, [to2],
        connection=connection,
    ).send()

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

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.filebased.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_FILE_PATH = '/tmp/app-messages' # change this to a proper location

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

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

from django.core import mail
connection = mail.get_connection()   # Use default email connection
messages = get_notification_email()
connection.send_messages(messages)

from django.core import mail
connection = mail.get_connection()

# Manually open the connection
connection.open()

# Construct an email message that uses the connection
email1 = mail.EmailMessage(
    'Hello',
    'Body goes here',
    '[email protected]',
    ['[email protected]'],
    connection=connection,
)
email1.send() # Send the email

# Construct two more messages
email2 = mail.EmailMessage(
    'Hello',
    'Body goes here',
    '[email protected]',
    ['[email protected]'],
)
email3 = mail.EmailMessage(
    'Hello',
    'Body goes here',
    '[email protected]',
    ['[email protected]'],
)

# Send the two emails in a single call -
connection.send_messages([email2, email3])
# The connection was already open so send_messages() doesn't close it.
# We need to manually close the connection.
connection.close()

Configuring email for development¶

There are times when you do not want Django to send emails at all. For example, while developing a website, you probably don’t want to send out thousands of emails – but you may want to validate that emails will be sent to the right people under the right conditions, and that those emails will contain the correct content.

The easiest way to configure email for local development is to use the console email backend. This backend redirects all email to stdout, allowing you to inspect the content of mail.

The file email backend can also be useful during development – this backend dumps the contents of every SMTP connection to a file that can be inspected at your leisure.

Another approach is to use a “dumb” SMTP server that receives the emails locally and displays them to the terminal, but does not actually send anything. Python has a built-in way to accomplish this with a single command:

python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025

This command will start a simple SMTP server listening on port 1025 of localhost. This server simply prints to standard output all email headers and the email body. You then only need to set the EMAIL_HOST and EMAIL_PORT accordingly. For a more detailed discussion of SMTP server options, see the Python documentation for the smtpd module.

For information about unit-testing the sending of emails in your application, see the Email services section of the testing documentation.