Flask-EZMail

Flask-EZMail is easier email for Flask.

Flask-EZMail is a fork of Flask-Mail. it maintains high compatibility with Flask-Mail, such that very little code refactoring is needed to switch from one to the other.

Flask-Mail is a convenient wrapper for smtlib, but it requrires that SMTP settings be loaded on app creation. If your user is entering SMTP settings via a web interface, it's not optimal and requires workarounds.

Flask-EZMail is designed to be flexible. You can load SMTP settings at app creation like you would with Flask-Mail, or you can load them at any later time if your user is setting them through an web admin panel. Check out the examples below!

Installation

pip install flask-ezmail

Creating an Email Object

Let's say you want to load SMTP settings at app creation and never change them, just like Flask-Mail would expect:

# app/__init__.py
...
from flask_ezmail import Mail
...

<other app creation stuff goes here>

mail = Mail(
  server=app.config['MAIL_SERVER'],
  username=app.config['MAIL_USERNAME'],
  password=app.config['MAIL_PASSWORD'],
  port=app.config['MAIL_PORT'],
  use_tls=True,
  default_sender=app.config['DEFAULT_SENDER'],
  debug=app.debug
)

In that example, you'd have a global variable called mail that you'd be able to import in your other modules using from app import mail. There's nothing special there, as that's similar to Flask-Mail.

But here is where the flexibility comes in! Let's instead say your user fills out a form in the admin panel that sets SMTP settings later, after app creation. We'll assume you've defined that as EmailSetupForm in your app.models. You could then set up mail this way instead:

from app.models import EmailSetupForm
from flask_ezmail import Mail

form = EmailSetupForm()

mail = Mail(
  server=form.server.data,
  username=form.username.data,
  password=form.password.data,
  port=form.port.data,
  use_tls=True,
  default_sender=form.default_sender.data,
  debug=False
)

You now have a mail object created on the fly! You'll probably want to stash it for later use elsewhere in your app. You have lots of options regarding how to do that:

1. You could pickle it and save it to redis:

import pickle

# this assumes you've set up redis in app/__init__.py
current_app.redis.set('mail', pickle.dumps(mail))

Alternatively if you're using Flask-SQLAlchemy, you could create an email model that inherits from Mail, and save it that way instead:

# app/models.py

from flask_ezmail import Mail

class Email(Mail, db.Model):
    __table_args__ = {'extend_existing': True}
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    server = db.Column(db.String(128))
    port = db.Column(db.Integer)
    username = db.Column(db.String(128))
    password = db.Column(db.String(128))
    default_sender = db.Column(db.String(128))
    outgoing_email = db.Column(db.String(128))
    use_tls = db.Column(db.Boolean)
    use_ssl = db.Column(db.Boolean)
    debug = db.Column(db.Boolean, default=False)
    max_emails = db.Column(db.Integer)
    suppress = db.Column(db.Boolean)

If you went the SQLAlchemy route, any time you need to grab your email client you'd just:

mail = Email.query.first()

And if you needed to change an SMTP setting on the fly:

from app import db
from app.models import Email

mail = Email.query.first()
if mail is not None:
    mail.server = 'example.net'
    db.session.commit()

Sending a message uses the same Message object as Flask-Mail (cloned in Flask-EZMail).

from flask_ezmail import Message

msg = Message(
    'Test Message',
    sender='sender@sender.com',
    recipients=['recipient@recipient.com'],
)
mail.send(msg)

Flask-EZmail likewise uses the same connect() method as Flask-Mail.