django-post-office 0.1.0

An app that allows you to keep track of email activities and send mail asynchronously in django.

Django Post Office is a simple mail queuing and logging app that allows you to keep track of email activities and send mails asynchronously in django.

The concept is similar to django-mailer and django-mailer-2. I maintained my own fork of django-mailer-2 here until I decided to make one from scratch because I wanted a cleaner code base.

post_office is implemented as a Django EmailBackend so you don’t need to change any of your code to start sending email asynchronously.

Dependencies

• django >= 1.2

Installation

• Install via pypi:

  pip install django-post_office

• Add post_office to your INSTALLED_APPS in django’s settings.py:

  INSTALLED_APPS = (
      # other apps
      "post_office",
  )

• Run syncdb:

  python manage.py syncdb

• Set post_office.EmailBackend as your EMAIL_BACKEND in django’s settings.py:

  EMAIL_BACKEND = 'post_office.EmailBackend'

Usage

If you use post_office’s EmailBackend, it will automatically queue emails sent using django’s send_mail in the database.

To actually send them out, run python manage.py send_queued_mail. You can schedule this to run regularly via cron:

* * * * * (/usr/bin/python manage.py send_queued_mail >> send_mail.log 2>&1)

By default, post_office uses django’s SMTP EmailBackend. If you want to use a different one, you can do so by changing POST_OFFICE_BACKEND.

For example if you want to use django-ses):

POST_OFFICE_BACKEND = 'django_ses.SESBackend'

You can view also queued emails along with their statuses if you have django’s admin interface enabled:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # ...
    'django.contrib.admin',
    # ...
)

Management Commands

• send_queued_mail will send queued emails. If there are any

  failures, they will be marked deferred and will not be attempted again by send_queued_mail.

• cleanup_mail will delete mails created before an X number of days

  (defaults to 90).

You may want to set these up via cron to run regularly:

* * * * * (cd $PROJECT; python manage.py send_queued_mail >> $PROJECT/cron_mail.log 2>&1)
0 1 * * * (cd $PROJECT; python manage.py cleanup_mail --days=30 >> $PROJECT/cron_mail_cleanup.log 2>&1)

Lower Level Usage

post_office also comes with a send_mail command that is very similar to django’s, except that it accepts two extra arguments html_message and priority (high, medium, low or now).

Here’s how to use it:

from post_office import send_mail, PRIORITY
send_mail('subject', 'plaintext message', '[e-mail]', ['[e-mail]'],
          '<p>HTML message</p>', priority=PRIORITY.medium)

post_office is also task queue friendly. Passing now as priority into send_mail will deliver the email right away, even if there’s another active process running send_queued_mail processing a thousand other messages:

from post_office import send_mail, PRIORITY
send_mail('subject', 'plaintext message', '[e-mail]', ['[e-mail]'],
          '<p>HTML message</p>', priority=PRIORITY.now)

This is also useful if you already use something like django-rq to send emails asynchronously and only need to store email activities and logs.