Sending email from Django

By Chris Wilson on 29 March 2012

Yesterday I wanted to send email notifications for document changes in the Generic Intranet. I found that the built-in Django method requires you to hard-code the email body. It doesn't support rendering email from templates, unlike Ruby on Rails, which is surprising and a shame.

I spent some time coding template support for it, and then when I tried to make it reusable, discovered that others had had the same idea.

Learning 1:

django is conservative. Lots of useful things never make it into the core. Search djangopackages.com for what you want before writing it. It has a LOT of packages.

Learning 2:

there's an existing document management package called Mayan EDMS, that does most of what ours does, which we could look at replacing or merging ours with.

I found two email-sending packages that support templates:

• django-mail-templated has an object-oriented interface but no tests;
• django-templated-email has tests but no object-oriented interface.

I decided to check out the object-oriented one, on a pretty much random basis, and add tests to it. You can find my fork of it here.

Learning 3:

If you want to send emails from a Django project, use our email app.

Learning 4:

if you want to send notifications in some kind of generic framework, not just email, have a look at the django-notification app instead.

Learning 5 (meta-learning):

it's useful to email round things that we discovered, like this one, as someone might have discovered this before and not told anyone, meaning that I had to spend time discovering it again; and also we can comment on each others' discoveries and add to them.