django-post-office 0.1.2

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. Supports sending HTML email.

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 backend, 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 - send queued emails, those that aren’t successfully sent they will be marked as failed.

• cleanup_mail - delete all emails 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 similar to django’s. 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, regardless of how many emails you have in your queue:

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