mail.send()

mail.send is the most important function in this library, it takes these arguments:

Here are a few examples.

If you just want to send out emails without using database templates. You can call the send command without the template argument.

from post_office import mail

mail.send(
    ['recipient1@example.com'],
    'from@example.com',
    subject='Welcome!',
    message='Welcome home, {{ name }}!',
    html_message='Welcome home, <b>{{ name }}</b>!',
    headers={'Reply-to': 'reply@example.com'},
    scheduled_time=date(2014, 1, 1),
    context={'name': 'Alice'},
)

post_office is also task queue friendly. Passing now as priority into send_mail will deliver the email right away (instead of queuing it), regardless of how many emails you have in your queue:

from post_office import mail

mail.send(
    ['recipient1@example.com'],
    'from@example.com',
    template='welcome_email',
    context={'foo': 'bar'},
    priority='now',
)

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

If you want to send an email with attachments:

from django.core.files.base import ContentFile
from post_office import mail

mail.send(
    ['recipient1@example.com'],
    'from@example.com',
    template='welcome_email',
    context={'foo': 'bar'},
    priority='now',
    attachments={
        'attachment1.doc', '/path/to/file/file1.doc',
        'attachment2.txt', ContentFile('file content'),
    }
)

Template Tags and Variables

post-office supports Django’s template tags and variables. For example, if you put “Hello, {{ name }}” in the subject line and pass in {'name': 'Alice'} as context, you will get “Hello, Alice” as subject:

from post_office.models import EmailTemplate
from post_office import mail

EmailTemplate.objects.create(
    name='morning_greeting',
    subject='Morning, {{ name|capfirst }}',
    content='Hi {{ name }}, how are you feeling today?',
    html_content='Hi <strong>{{ name }}</strong>, how are you feeling today?',
)

mail.send(
    ['recipient@example.com'],
    'from@example.com',
    template='morning_greeting',
    context={'name': 'alice'},
)

# This will create an email with the following content:
subject = 'Morning, Alice',
content = 'Hi alice, how are you feeling today?'
content = 'Hi <strong>alice</strong>, how are you feeling today?'

Multilingual Email Templates

You can easily create email templates in various different languanges. For example:

template = EmailTemplate.objects.create(
    name='hello',
    subject='Hello world!',
)

# Add an Indonesian version of this template:
indonesian_template = template.translated_templates.create(
    language='id',
    subject='Halo Dunia!'
)

Sending an email using template in a non default languange is also similarly easy:

mail.send(
    ['recipient@example.com'],
    'from@example.com',
    template=template, # Sends using the default template
)

mail.send(
    ['recipient@example.com'],
    'from@example.com',
    template=template,
    language='id', # Sends using Indonesian template
)

Custom Email Backends

By default, post_office uses django’s smtp.EmailBackend. If you want to use a different backend, you can do so by configuring BACKENDS.

For example if you want to use django-ses:

POST_OFFICE = {
    'BACKENDS': {
        'default': 'smtp.EmailBackend',
        'ses': 'django_ses.SESBackend',
    }
}

You can then choose what backend you want to use when sending mail:

# If you omit `backend_alias` argument, `default` will be used
mail.send(
    ['recipient@example.com'],
    'from@example.com',
    subject='Hello',
)

# If you want to send using `ses` backend
mail.send(
    ['recipient@example.com'],
    'from@example.com',
    subject='Hello',
    backend='ses',
)

Management Commands

• send_queued_mail - send queued emails, those aren’t successfully sent will be marked as failed. Accepts the following arguments:

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

Batch Size

If you may want to limit the number of emails sent in a batch (sometimes useful in a low memory environment), use the BATCH_SIZE argument to limit the number of queued emails fetched in one batch.

# Put this in settings.py
POST_OFFICE = {
    'BATCH_SIZE': 5000
}

Default Priority

The default priority for emails is medium, but this can be altered by setting DEFAULT_PRIORITY. Integration with asynchronous email backends (e.g. based on Celery) becomes trivial when set to now.

# Put this in settings.py
POST_OFFICE = {
    'DEFAULT_PRIORITY': 'now'
}

Log Level

The default log level is 2 (logs both successful and failed deliveries) This behavior can be changed by setting LOG_LEVEL.

# Put this in settings.py
POST_OFFICE = {
    'LOG_LEVEL': 1 # Log only failed deliveries
}

The different options are: * 0 logs nothing * 1 logs only failed deliveries * 2 logs everything (both successful and failed delivery attempts)

Sending Order

The default sending order for emails is -priority, but this can be altered by setting SENDING_ORDER. For example, if you want to send queued emails in FIFO order :

# Put this in settings.py
POST_OFFICE = {
    'SENDING_ORDER': ['created']
}

Context Field Serializer

If you need to store complex Python objects for deferred rendering (i.e. setting render_on_delivery=True), you can specify your own context field class to store context variables. For example if you want to use django-picklefield:

# Put this in settings.py
POST_OFFICE = {
    'CONTEXT_FIELD_CLASS': 'picklefield.fields.PickledObjectField'
}

CONTEXT_FIELD_CLASS defaults to jsonfield.JSONField.

Logging

You can configure post-office’s logging from Django’s settings.py. For example:

LOGGING = {
    "version": 1,
    "disable_existing_loggers": False,
    "formatters": {
        "post_office": {
            "format": "[%(levelname)s]%(asctime)s PID %(process)d: %(message)s",
            "datefmt": "%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S",
        },
    },
    "handlers": {
        "post_office": {
            "level": "DEBUG",
            "class": "logging.StreamHandler",
            "formatter": "post_office"
        },
        # If you use sentry for logging
        'sentry': {
            'level': 'ERROR',
            'class': 'raven.contrib.django.handlers.SentryHandler',
        },
    },
    'loggers': {
        "post_office": {
            "handlers": ["post_office", "sentry"],
            "level": "INFO"
        },
    },
}

Caching

if Django’s caching mechanism is configured, post_office will cache EmailTemplate instances . If for some reason you want to disable caching, 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',
    }
}

send_many()

send_many() is much more performant (generates less database queries) when sending a large number of emails. send_many() is almost identical to mail.send(), with the exception that it accepts a list of keyword arguments that you’d usually pass into mail.send():

from post_office import mail

first_email = {
    'sender': 'from@example.com',
    'recipients': ['alice@example.com'],
    'subject': 'Hi!',
    'message': 'Hi Alice!'
}
second_email = {
    'sender': 'from@example.com',
    'recipients': ['bob@example.com'],
    'subject': 'Hi!',
    'message': 'Hi Bob!'
}
kwargs_list = [first_email, second_email]

mail.send_many(kwargs_list)

Attachments are not supported with mail.send_many().

Version 2.0

• Added multi backend support. Now you can use multiple email backends with post-office!

• Added multi language support. Thanks @jrief!

Version 1.1.2

• Adds Django 1.8 compatibility.

Version 1.1.1

• Fixes a migration error. Thanks @garry-cairns!

Version 1.1.0

• Support for Django 1.7 migrations. If you’re still on Django < 1.7, South migration files are stored in south_migrations directory.

Version 1.0.0

• IMPORTANT: in older versions, passing multiple recipients into mail.send() will create multiple emails, each addressed to one recipient. Starting from 1.0.0, only one email with multiple recipients will be created.

• Added LOG_LEVEL setting.

• mail.send() now supports cc and bcc. Thanks Ștefan Daniel Mihăilă (@stefan-mihaila)!

• Improvements to admin interface; you can now easily requeue multiple emails.

• Log model now stores the type of exception caught during sending.

• send_templated_mail command is now deprecated.

• Added EMAIL_BACKEND setting to the new dictionary-styled settings.

Full changelog can be found here.

Created and maintained by the cool guys at Stamps, Indonesia’s most elegant CRM/loyalty platform.