django-post-office 0.2.0

A Django app that allows you to log email activities and send mail asynchronously, complete with template support.

Django Post Office is a simple app that allows you to log email activities and asynchronously send emails in django. Supports 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.

Email Templates

post_office also allows you to easily send templated rendered emails. Email templates in post_office are stored in database and can be easily added via Django’s admin interface.

Here’s how to send templated emails:

1. Create an EmailTemplate from django’s admin interface

2. Send the email using send_templated_mail command:

from post_office.utils import send_templated_mail
send_templated_mail('template_name', '[e-mail]', ['[e-mail]'])

# Here's a list of full arguments accepted by send_templated mail
send_templated_mail(
    'template_name',        # Name of the template
    '[e-mail]',     # Sender email
    ['[e-mail]'],     # List of recipient emails
    context={'foo': 'bar'}, # Extra data that will be used during template rendering
    priority=PRIORITY.now,  # Email priority
)

If CACHES is configured in Django’s settings.py, EmailTemplate``s will be cached by default. If for some reason you want to disable caching, you can set ``POST_OFFICE_CACHE to False in settings.py:

## All cache key will be prefixed by post_office:template:
## To turn OFF caching, you need to explicitly set POST_OFFICE_CACHE to False in settings
POST_OFFICE_CACHE = False

## Optional: to use a non default cache backend, add a "post_office" entry in CACHES
CACHES = {
    'post_office': {
        'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.memcached.PyLibMCCache',
        'LOCATION': '127.0.0.1:11211',
    }
}

Testing

To run post_office’s test suite:

`which django-admin.py` test post_office --settings=post_office.test_settings --pythonpath=.

Changelog

Version 0.2

• Allows sending emails via database backed templates

Version 0.1.5

• Errors when opening connection in Email.dispatch method are now logged