Django provides wrappers for Python’s email and smtplib modules
to simplify composing and sending email. Django’s email framework also supports
swapping in different delivery mechanisms: you can direct email to the console
or a file during development, or use community-maintained solutions for sending
email directly through commercial email service providers.
The code lives in the django.core.mail module.
Use send_mail() for straightforward email sending. For example, to send a
plain text message:
from django.core.mail import send_mail
send_mail(
"Subject here",
"Here is the message.",
"from@example.com",
["to@example.com"],
)
When additional email sending functionality is needed, use the
EmailMessage or EmailMultiAlternatives
class. For example, to send a multipart email that includes both HTML and plain
text versions with a specific template and custom headers, you can use the
following approach:
from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
from django.template.loader import render_to_string
# First, render the plain text content.
text_content = render_to_string(
"templates/emails/my_email.txt",
context={"my_variable": 42},
)
# Secondly, render the HTML content.
html_content = render_to_string(
"templates/emails/my_email.html",
context={"my_variable": 42},
)
# Then, create a multipart email instance.
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(
subject="Subject here",
body=text_content,
from_email="from@example.com",
to=["to@example.com"],
headers={"List-Unsubscribe": "<mailto:unsub@example.com>"},
)
# Lastly, attach the HTML content to the email instance and send.
msg.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
msg.send()
New Django projects are not configured to send email by default. Instead, email
is printed to stdout as a development aid (for projects created with
startproject) or results in a MailerDoesNotExist error (when the
MAILERS setting isn’t defined).
To enable sending real email, you will need to tell Django how to send it by
creating or editing the MAILERS setting. For example, to send
through an SMTP server running on the local machine:
MAILERS = {
"default": {
"BACKEND": "django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend",
"OPTIONS": {
"host": "localhost",
},
},
}
SMTP is supported by nearly all email service mailers and many hosting environments. But there are other options: many commercial services offer APIs with additional sending features, and during development or testing you might not want to send email at all.
Django abstracts the email sending process into an “email backend” class. Email backends lists the email backends that come with Django: the SMTP backend for production use and several others meant for development and testing. It also covers third-party packages and custom backends if Django’s built-in backends don’t meet your needs.
Django’s test runner automatically overrides the email configuration during testing. It substitutes the memory backend for each defined mailer, preventing email from being sent and giving test cases access to the messages.
In earlier releases, Django defaulted to sending email through an SMTP
server running on localhost (using the now-deprecated
EMAIL_BACKEND and related settings).
Deprecated since version 6.1: Until Django 7.0, if the MAILERS setting is not defined then the
earlier behavior still applies: Django will default to using an SMTP server
on localhost (but will issue deprecation warnings). Starting in Django 7.0,
attempts to send email without MAILERS defined will result in a
MailerDoesNotExist error.
Existing projects can opt into the new behavior early by adding
MAILERS to settings.py. See Migrating email to mailers.
Sometimes different types of email need to be sent in different ways: internal vs. external email, different servers for users in different regions, different services for transactional notifications and bulk marketing email, etc.
The MAILERS setting can define multiple mail configurations. For
example:
import os
MAILERS = {
"default": {
"BACKEND": "django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend",
"OPTIONS": {
"host": "smtp.example.net",
"use_tls": True,
"username": os.environ["EMAIL_ACCOUNT_ID"],
"password": os.environ["EMAIL_API_KEY"],
},
},
"notifications": {
"BACKEND": "example.third.party.EmailBackend",
"OPTIONS": {
"api_key": os.environ["THIRD_PARTY_API_KEY"],
"region": "eu",
},
},
"admin": {
"BACKEND": "django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend",
"OPTIONS": {
"host": "localhost",
},
},
}
This defines three mailer configurations:
"default" sends through an SMTP server at smtp.example.net with a TLS
secured connection. It reads an account id and API key from environment
variables and uses them as the SMTP authentication username and password.
(Many SMTP relay services use some variation of this authentication scheme.
Check your provider’s documentation for specific options to use.)
"notifications" sends through a hypothetical commercial email service,
using a third-party EmailBackend that connects directly to their API.
(See Third-party backends for pointers on locating real,
community maintained email backend packages.)
"admin" sends through an SMTP server running on localhost, with no
other options required.
With this configuration, you can provide the using argument to Django’s
email sending functions to specify a particular
mailer configuration:
from django.core.mail import send_mail
send_mail(
"Account activated",
"Congratulations, you're all ready to use our Django app!",
"from@example.com",
["user@example.com"],
using="notifications",
)
If using is not specified, Django uses the mailer defined for the
"default" mailer configuration.
With reusable apps or Django features that send email for you, there may be an
option to use a specific mailer. For example, Django’s logging
AdminEmailHandler allows specifying the mailer
configuration in its using option.
django.core.mail provides functions for conveniently sending email, as
well as classes for building and sending more complex email messages with
attachments and multiple content types.
Note
The character set of email sent with django.core.mail will be set to
the value of your DEFAULT_CHARSET setting.
send_mail()¶django.core.mail.send_mail() sends a single email message.
The subject, message, from_email and recipient_list parameters
are required.
subject: A string.
message: A string.
from_email: A string. If None, Django will use the value of the
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL setting.
recipient_list: A list of strings, each an email address. Each
member of recipient_list will see the other recipients in the “To:”
field of the email message.
The following parameters are optional, and must be given as keyword arguments if used.
fail_silently: A boolean. When it’s False, send_mail() will raise
an smtplib.SMTPException if an error occurs. See the smtplib
docs for a list of possible exceptions, all of which are subclasses of
SMTPException.
auth_user: The optional username to use to authenticate to the SMTP
server. If this isn’t provided, Django will use the value of the
EMAIL_HOST_USER setting.
auth_password: The optional password to use to authenticate to the
SMTP server. If this isn’t provided, Django will use the value of the
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD setting.
connection: The optional email backend to use to send the mail.
If unspecified, an instance of the default backend will be used.
See the documentation on Email backends
for more details.
html_message: If html_message is provided, the resulting email will
be a multipart/alternative email with message as the
text/plain content type and html_message as the
text/html content type.
using: An optional MAILERS alias to use to send the mail. If
unspecified, the default mailer configuration will be used.
fail_silently, auth_user, auth_password, and connection are not
allowed with the using argument.
The return value will be the number of successfully delivered messages (which
can be 0 or 1 since it can only send one message).
Deprecated since version 6.0: Passing fail_silently and later parameters as positional arguments is
deprecated.
Deprecated since version 6.1: The fail_silently, auth_user, auth_password, and connection
arguments are deprecated. In most cases they can be replaced by using
with an appropriate MAILERS configuration. See
Migrating email to mailers.
The using argument was added.
Older versions ignored fail_silently=True, auth_user,
and auth_password when a connection was also provided.
This now raises a TypeError.
send_mass_mail()¶django.core.mail.send_mass_mail() is intended to handle mass emailing.
datatuple is a tuple in which each element is in this format:
(subject, message, from_email, recipient_list)
fail_silently, auth_user, auth_password and connection have the
same functions as in send_mail(). They must be given as keyword arguments
if used, and are not allowed with the using argument.
The keyword argument using is an optional MAILERS alias to use
to send the mail. If unspecified, the default mailer configuration will be
used.
Each separate element of datatuple results in a separate email message.
As in send_mail(), recipients in the same recipient_list will all see
the other addresses in the email messages’ “To:” field.
For example, the following code would send two different messages to two different sets of recipients; however, only one connection to the mail server would be opened:
message1 = (
"Subject here",
"Here is the message",
"from@example.com",
["first@example.com", "other@example.com"],
)
message2 = (
"Another Subject",
"Here is another message",
"from@example.com",
["second@test.com"],
)
send_mass_mail((message1, message2), fail_silently=False)
The return value will be the number of successfully delivered messages.
Deprecated since version 6.0: Passing fail_silently and later parameters as positional arguments is
deprecated.
Deprecated since version 6.1: The fail_silently, auth_user, auth_password, and connection
arguments are deprecated. In most cases they can be replaced by using
with an appropriate MAILERS configuration. See
Migrating email to mailers.
The using argument was added.
Older versions ignored fail_silently=True, auth_user,
and auth_password when a connection was also provided.
This now raises a TypeError.
send_mass_mail() vs. send_mail()¶The main difference between send_mass_mail() and repeatedly calling
send_mail() is that send_mail() opens a connection to the mail
server each time it’s executed, while send_mass_mail() uses a single
connection for all of its messages. This makes send_mass_mail() slightly
more efficient.
send_mail() with multiple to addresses sends a single email message,
with john@example.com and jane@example.com both appearing in the “To:”
field:
send_mail(
"Subject",
"Message.",
"from@example.com",
["john@example.com", "jane@example.com"],
)
send_mass_mail() sends a separate message per datatuple element, so
john@example.com and jane@example.com each receive their own email:
datatuple = (
("Subject", "Message.", "from@example.com", ["john@example.com"]),
("Subject", "Message.", "from@example.com", ["jane@example.com"]),
)
send_mass_mail(datatuple)
mail_admins()¶django.core.mail.mail_admins() is a shortcut for sending an email to the
site admins, as defined in the ADMINS setting.
mail_admins() prefixes the subject with the value of the
EMAIL_SUBJECT_PREFIX setting, which is "[Django] " by default.
The “From:” header of the email will be the value of the
SERVER_EMAIL setting.
This method exists for convenience and readability.
If html_message is provided, the resulting email will be a
multipart/alternative email with message as the
text/plain content type and html_message as the
text/html content type.
The keyword argument using is an optional MAILERS alias to use
to send the mail. If unspecified, the default mailer configuration will be
used.
Deprecated since version 6.0: Passing fail_silently and later parameters as positional arguments is
deprecated.
Deprecated since version 6.1: The fail_silently and connection arguments are deprecated. In most
cases they can be replaced by using with an appropriate
MAILERS configuration. See Migrating email to mailers.
The using argument was added.
Older versions ignored fail_silently=True when a connection
was also provided. This now raises a TypeError.
mail_managers()¶django.core.mail.mail_managers() is just like mail_admins(), except it
sends an email to the site managers, as defined in the MANAGERS
setting.
The keyword argument using is an optional MAILERS alias to use
to send the mail. If unspecified, the default mailer configuration will be
used.
Deprecated since version 6.0: Passing fail_silently and later parameters as positional arguments is
deprecated.
Deprecated since version 6.1: The fail_silently and connection arguments are deprecated. In most
cases they can be replaced by using with an appropriate
MAILERS configuration. See Migrating email to mailers.
The using argument was added.
Older versions ignored fail_silently=True when a connection
was also provided. This now raises a TypeError.
EmailMessage class¶Django’s send_mail() and send_mass_mail() functions are actually
thin wrappers that make use of the EmailMessage class.
Not all features of the EmailMessage class are available through the
send_mail() and related wrapper functions. If you wish to use advanced
features, such as BCC’ed recipients, file attachments, or multi-part email,
you’ll need to create EmailMessage instances directly.
Note
This is a design feature. send_mail() and related functions were
originally the only interface Django provided. However, the list of
parameters they accepted was slowly growing over time. It made sense to
move to a more object-oriented design for email messages and retain the
original functions only for backwards compatibility.
EmailMessage is responsible for creating the email message itself. The
email backend is then responsible for sending the
email.
For convenience, EmailMessage provides a send()
method for sending a single email. If you need to send multiple messages, the
email backend API provides an alternative.
The EmailMessage class is initialized with the following
parameters. All parameters are optional and can be set at any time prior
to calling the send() method.
The first four parameters can be passed as positional or keyword arguments, but must be in the given order if positional arguments are used:
subject: The subject line of the email.
body: The body text. This should be a plain text message.
from_email: The sender’s address. Both fred@example.com and
"Fred" <fred@example.com> forms are legal. If omitted, the
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL setting is used.
to: A list or tuple of recipient addresses.
The following parameters must be given as keyword arguments if used:
cc: A list or tuple of recipient addresses used in the “Cc” header
when sending the email.
bcc: A list or tuple of addresses used in the “Bcc” header when
sending the email.
reply_to: A list or tuple of recipient addresses used in the
“Reply-To” header when sending the email.
attachments: A list of attachments to put on the message. Each can
be an instance of MIMEPart or
EmailAttachment, or a tuple with attributes
(filename, content, mimetype).
Support for MIMEPart objects in the
attachments list was added.
headers: A dictionary of extra headers to put on the message. The
keys are the header name, values are the header values. It’s up to the
caller to ensure header names and values are in the correct format for
an email message. The corresponding attribute is extra_headers.
connection: An email backend instance.
This parameter is ignored when using
send_messages().
Deprecated since version 6.1: The connection argument is deprecated. Instead, define a
MAILERS configuration with the desired connection options,
and then call EmailMessage.send(using="...") with that
configuration’s alias. See Migrating email to mailers.
Deprecated since version 6.0: Passing all except the first four parameters as positional arguments is deprecated.
For example:
from django.core.mail import EmailMessage
email = EmailMessage(
subject="Hello",
body="Body goes here",
from_email="from@example.com",
to=["to1@example.com", "to2@example.com"],
bcc=["bcc@example.com"],
reply_to=["another@example.com"],
headers={"Message-ID": "foo"},
)
The class has the following methods:
Sends the message. Returns 1 if the message was sent successfully,
otherwise 0. (An empty list of recipients returns 0 – it will
not raise an exception.)
The optional using keyword argument specifies a MAILERS
alias to use to send the mail. If not given, the default mailer
configuration will be used.
If a deprecated connection was specified when the email was
constructed, that connection will be used. Providing both a connection
and using will raise an error.
If the deprecated keyword argument fail_silently is True,
certain backend-dependent exceptions while sending the message will be
ignored. Providing both fail_silently and using will raise an
error.
The using argument was added.
Older versions ignored fail_silently=True when a connection
was also provided. This now raises a TypeError.
Deprecated since version 6.1: The fail_silently argument is deprecated. See
Replacing fail_silently for alternatives.
Constructs and returns a Python email.message.EmailMessage
object representing the message to be sent.
The keyword argument policy allows specifying the set of rules for
updating and serializing the representation of the message. It must be
an email.policy.Policy object. Defaults to
email.policy.default. In certain cases you may want to use
SMTP, SMTPUTF8 or a custom
policy. For example, the SMTP email backend uses the SMTP policy
to ensure \r\n line endings as required by the SMTP protocol.
If you ever need to extend Django’s EmailMessage class,
you’ll probably want to override this method to put the content you
want into the Python EmailMessage object.
The policy keyword argument was added and the return type was
updated to an instance of EmailMessage.
Returns a list of all the recipients of the message, whether they’re
recorded in the to, cc or bcc attributes. This is another
method you might need to override when subclassing, because the SMTP
server needs to be told the full list of recipients when the message
is sent. If you add another way to specify recipients in your class,
they need to be returned from this method as well.
Creates a new attachment and adds it to the message. There are two ways
to call attach():
You can pass it three arguments: filename, content and
mimetype. filename is the name of the file attachment as it
will appear in the email, content is the data that will be
contained inside the attachment and mimetype is the optional MIME
type for the attachment. If you omit mimetype, the MIME content
type will be guessed from the filename of the attachment.
For example:
message.attach("design.png", img_data, "image/png")
If you specify a mimetype of message/rfc822,
content can be a django.core.mail.EmailMessage or
Python’s email.message.EmailMessage or
email.message.Message.
For a mimetype starting with text/, content is
expected to be a string. Binary data will be decoded using UTF-8,
and if that fails, the MIME type will be changed to
application/octet-stream and the data will be attached
unchanged.
Or for attachments requiring additional headers or parameters, you
can pass attach() a single Python
MIMEPart object. This will be attached
directly to the resulting message. For example, to attach an inline
image with a Content-ID:
import email.utils
from email.message import MIMEPart
from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
message = EmailMultiAlternatives(...)
image_data_bytes = ... # Load image as bytes
# Create a random Content-ID, including angle brackets
cid = email.utils.make_msgid()
inline_image = email.message.MIMEPart()
inline_image.set_content(
image_data_bytes,
maintype="image",
subtype="png", # or "jpeg", etc. depending on the image type
disposition="inline",
cid=cid,
)
message.attach(inline_image)
# Refer to Content-ID in HTML without angle brackets
message.attach_alternative(f'… <img src="cid:{cid[1:-1]}"> …', "text/html")
Python’s email.contentmanager.set_content() documentation
describes the supported arguments for MIMEPart.set_content().
Support for MIMEPart attachments was
added.
Deprecated since version 6.0: Support for email.mime.base.MIMEBase attachments is
deprecated. Use MIMEPart instead.
Creates a new attachment using a file from your filesystem. Call it with the path of the file to attach and, optionally, the MIME type to use for the attachment. If the MIME type is omitted, it will be guessed from the filename. You can use it like this:
message.attach_file("/images/weather_map.png")
For MIME types starting with text/, binary data is handled
as in attach().
A named tuple to store attachments to an email.
The named tuple has the following indexes:
filename
content
mimetype
It can be useful to include multiple versions of the content in an email; the
classic example is to send both text and HTML versions of a message. With
Django’s email library, you can do this using the
EmailMultiAlternatives class.
A subclass of EmailMessage that allows additional versions of the
message body in the email via the attach_alternative() method. This
directly inherits all methods (including the class initialization) from
EmailMessage.
A list of EmailAlternative named tuples.
This is particularly useful in tests:
self.assertEqual(len(msg.alternatives), 1)
self.assertEqual(msg.alternatives[0].content, html_content)
self.assertEqual(msg.alternatives[0].mimetype, "text/html")
Alternatives should only be added using the attach_alternative()
method, or passed to the constructor.
Attach an alternative representation of the message body in the email.
For example, to send a text and HTML combination, you could write:
from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
subject = "hello"
from_email = "from@example.com"
to = "to@example.com"
text_content = "This is an important message."
html_content = "<p>This is an <strong>important</strong> message.</p>"
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, text_content, from_email, [to])
msg.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
msg.send()
Returns a boolean indicating whether the provided text is
contained in the email body and in all attached MIME type
text/* alternatives.
This can be useful when testing emails. For example:
def test_contains_email_content(self):
subject = "Hello World"
from_email = "from@example.com"
to = "to@example.com"
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, "I am content.", from_email, [to])
msg.attach_alternative("<p>I am content.</p>", "text/html")
self.assertIs(msg.body_contains("I am content"), True)
self.assertIs(msg.body_contains("<p>I am content.</p>"), False)
A named tuple to store alternative versions of email content.
The named tuple has the following indexes:
content
mimetype
By default, the MIME type of the body parameter in an EmailMessage
is "text/plain". It is good practice to leave this alone, because it
guarantees that any recipient will be able to read the email, regardless of
their mail client. However, if you are confident that your recipients can
handle an alternative content type, you can use the content_subtype
attribute on the EmailMessage class to change the main content type.
The major type will always be "text", but you can change the subtype. For
example:
msg = EmailMessage(subject, html_content, from_email, [to])
msg.content_subtype = "html" # Main content is now text/html
msg.send()
Header injection is a security exploit in which an attacker inserts extra email headers to control the “To:” and “From:” in email messages that your scripts generate.
The Django email functions outlined above all protect against header injection
by forbidding newlines in header values. If any subject, from_email or
recipient_list contains a newline (in either Unix, Windows or Mac style),
the email function (e.g. send_mail()) will raise ValueError and,
hence, will not send the email. It’s your responsibility to validate all data
before passing it to the email functions.
If a message contains headers at the start of the string, the headers will
be printed as the first bit of the email message.
Here’s an example view that takes a subject, message and from_email
from the request’s POST data, sends that to admin@example.com and redirects
to “/contact/thanks/” when it’s done:
from django.core.mail import send_mail
from django.http import HttpResponse, HttpResponseRedirect
def send_email(request):
subject = request.POST.get("subject", "")
message = request.POST.get("message", "")
from_email = request.POST.get("from_email", "")
if subject and message and from_email:
try:
send_mail(subject, message, from_email, ["admin@example.com"])
except ValueError:
return HttpResponse("Invalid header found.")
return HttpResponseRedirect("/contact/thanks/")
else:
# In reality we'd use a form class
# to get proper validation errors.
return HttpResponse("Make sure all fields are entered and valid.")
Older versions raised django.core.mail.BadHeaderError for some
invalid headers. This has been replaced with ValueError.
Establishing and closing an SMTP connection (or any other network connection, for that matter) is an expensive process. If you have a lot of emails to send, it makes sense to reuse an SMTP connection, rather than creating and destroying a connection every time you want to send an email.
There are two ways to tell an email backend to reuse a connection. Both
require an email backend instance obtained via get_connection(), which is
documented in Email backends.
The first approach is to obtain an email backend instance from mailers
and use its send_messages() method. This takes a list of
EmailMessage (or subclass) instances, and sends them all using that
single connection.
For example, if you have a function called get_notification_emails() that
returns a list of EmailMessage objects representing some periodic
email you wish to send out, you could send these emails using a single call to
send_messages():
from django.core import mail
email_list = get_notification_emails()
# Use the default mailer. You could substitute
# mail.mailers["alias"] for a specific mailer.
backend = mail.mailers.default
backend.send_messages(email_list)
In this example, the call to send_messages() opens a connection on the
backend, sends the list of messages, and then closes the connection again.
(This is how send_mass_mail() is implemented.)
The second approach is to use the open() and close() methods on the
email backend to manually control the connection. send_messages() will not
open or close the connection if it is already open, so if you
manually open the connection, you can control when it is closed. For example:
from django.core import mail
# Use the "notifications" mailer configuration.
backend = mail.mailers["notifications"]
# Manually open the connection.
backend.open()
# Construct an email message. (Passing None as the third argument
# uses settings.DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL as the "From:" address.)
email1 = mail.EmailMessage("Hi", "Message", None, ["to1@example.com"])
# Send the email. The connection was already open, so send_messages()
# leaves it open after sending.
backend.send_messages([email1])
# Construct and send two more messages. The connection is still open.
email2 = mail.EmailMessage("Hi", "Message", None, ["to2@example.com"])
email3 = mail.EmailMessage("Hi", "Message", None, ["to3@example.com"])
backend.send_messages([email2, email3])
# Because we opened it, we need to manually close the connection.
backend.close()
When you manually open a backend’s connection, you are responsible for ensuring
it gets closed. The example above actually has a bug: if an exception occurs
while sending the messages, the connection will not be closed. This can be
fixed with a try-finally statement, but using the backend instance as a
context manager is preferable, as it automatically calls open() and
close() as needed.
This is equivalent to the previous example, but uses the backend as a context manager to avoid leaving the connection open on errors:
from django.core import mail
# Use mail.mailers[...] as a context manager.
with mail.mailers["notifications"] as backend:
# The backend connection is automatically opened inside the context.
email1 = mail.EmailMessage("Hi", "Message", None, ["to1@example.com"])
backend.send_messages([email1])
# The connection is still open, and is reused for the second send.
email2 = mail.EmailMessage("Hi", "Message", None, ["to2@example.com"])
email3 = mail.EmailMessage("Hi", "Message", None, ["to3@example.com"])
backend.send_messages([email2, email3])
# After exiting the context (either normally or because of an error),
# the backend connection is automatically closed.
The actual sending of an email is handled by the email backend.
Django comes with several email backends. With the exception of the SMTP backend, these are mainly useful during testing and development. If the built-in backends don’t meet your needs there are third-party packages available. You can also subclass one of the built-in backends to change its behavior, or even write your own email backend.
The email backend class has the following methods:
open() instantiates a long-lived email-sending connection.
close() closes the current email-sending connection.
send_messages(email_messages) sends a list of EmailMessage
objects. If the connection is not open, this call will implicitly open the
connection, and close the connection afterward. If the connection is already
open, it will be left open after mail has been sent.
It can also be used as a context manager, which will automatically call
open() and close() as needed. An example is in
Sending many messages efficiently.
The SMTP email backend connects to an SMTP server to send email. To use it, set
BACKEND to
"django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend".
The SMTP backend supports these OPTIONS:
"host" (required): the SMTP server hostname or IP address.
"port": the port number to connect to on the SMTP host. If omitted,
uses the standard port for the connection protocol depending on the
"use_tls" and "use_ssl" options: 587 for TLS, 465 for SSL,
or 25 for an unsecured connection.
"username" and "password": set these if your server requires SMTP
authentication (“SMTP AUTH” credentials, sometimes called SMTP login).
Although the username is often an email address, it should not be confused
with default “From:” addresses. Those are defined by the
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL and SERVER_EMAIL settings.
"use_tls" or "use_ssl": set one of these options to True to
connect to the SMTP server using a secure protocol – "use_tls" for
explicit TLS or "use_ssl" for SSL (implicit TLS).
"ssl_certfile" and "ssl_keyfile": if the SMTP server’s SSL/TLS
connection requires client certificate authentication, use these options to
specify the paths to a PEM-formatted certificate chain file and private key
file. (The key file can be omitted if the certificate file includes the
private key.)
These options are not intended for use with a private certificate authority or self-signed SMTP server certificate. See Private and self-signed SMTP server certificates below.
Note that these options don’t result in checking certificate validity. They
are passed to the underlying SSL connection. Refer to the documentation of
Python’s ssl.SSLContext.wrap_socket() method for details on how the
certificate chain file and private key file are handled.
"timeout": the timeout (in seconds) for connecting to the SMTP server and
other blocking operations. If not specified, the value is obtained from
socket.getdefaulttimeout(), which defaults to no timeout (None)
meaning SMTP operations can block indefinitely.
"fail_silently": set to True to ignore certain errors while sending
a message. All OSErrors are ignored while opening the SMTP
connection, and smtplib.SMTPException errors are ignored while
communicating with the server. This will suppress both transient network
glitches and also serious configuration problems. However, it does not ignore
all errors, and problems with serializing the message will not fail
silently. (This option is available for backward compatibility but is not
recommended for typical use.)
Example:
MAILERS = {
"default": {
"BACKEND": "django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend",
"OPTIONS": {
"host": "smtp.example.net",
"use_tls": True,
"username": "my-app",
"password": os.environ["MY_APP_SMTP_PASSWORD"],
"timeout": 10,
},
},
}
Deprecated since version 6.1: When the MAILERS setting is not defined, Django uses the SMTP
backend as the default mailer (the default EMAIL_BACKEND),
connecting to localhost on port 25. This behavior will be removed in Django
7.0, which will not have a default email mailer.
When the SMTP backend is used without MAILERS defined,
the options listed above are obtained from the deprecated
EMAIL_HOST, EMAIL_PORT, EMAIL_HOST_USER,
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD, EMAIL_USE_TLS,
EMAIL_USE_SSL, EMAIL_SSL_KEYFILE,
EMAIL_SSL_CERTFILE, and EMAIL_TIMEOUT settings,
respectively. (There is no setting equivalent to the "fail_silently"
option.)
Directly instantiating an EmailBackend class is not recommended. Use
mailers to obtain a backend instance.
When constructed directly, the SMTP EmailBackend class accepts the
options listed above as keyword arguments. Default values come from the
corresponding, deprecated EMAIL_* settings. host is not required
and defaults to "localhost", and port defaults to 25 even if
use_tls or use_ssl is True.
When the MAILERS setting is defined, attempting to directly
create an SMTP EmailBackend will raise an AttributeError.
Deprecated since version 6.1: Directly constructing an instance of an EmailBackend class will be
unsupported in Django 7.0. Undocumented use will result in different
default argument handling compared to earlier releases.
If the SMTP server uses an SSL certificate from a private certificate authority
(CA), the CA’s root certificate should be added to the system CA bundle on the
client (where Django is running). Likewise, if the server uses a self-signed
certificate, it should be added to the client’s system CA bundle so it can be
trusted. (The SMTP backend’s "ssl_certfile" option cannot be used for CA
roots or self-signed certificates.)
Follow platform-specific instructions for adding to the system CA bundle. If
modifying the system bundle is not possible or desired, an alternative is using
OpenSSL’s SSL_CERT_FILE or SSL_CERT_DIR environment variables to
specify a custom certificate bundle.
For more complex scenarios, the SMTP backend can be subclassed to add root
certificates to its ssl_context using
ssl.SSLContext.load_verify_locations().
Instead of sending out real emails, the console backend writes the emails that
would be sent to the standard output. To use it, set BACKEND to "django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend".
The console backend supports these OPTIONS:
"stream": a stream-like object to write to. Defaults to stdout.
"fail_silently": set to True to ignore all errors while writing the
message to the stream, including errors serializing the message. (This option
is available for backward compatibility but is not recommended.)
This backend is not intended for use in production – it is provided as a convenience that can be used during development.
The settings file created by startproject now sets up
MAILERS with the console backend as the default mailer.
The file backend writes emails to a file. A new file is created for each new
session that is opened on this backend. To use it, set BACKEND to "django.core.mail.backends.filebased.EmailBackend".
The file backend supports these OPTIONS:
"file_path" (required): the directory to which the files are written. Can
be a string or a pathlib.Path object. If the directory does not
exist, the file backend will attempt to create it.
"fail_silently": set to True to ignore all errors while writing the
message to the file – including errors serializing the message – but not
errors related to ensuring the file path directory exists. (This option is
available for backward compatibility but is not recommended.)
This backend is not intended for use in production – it is provided as a convenience that can be used during development.
Deprecated since version 6.1: When the file backend is used without the MAILERS setting
defined, it will get its file_path option from the
EMAIL_FILE_PATH setting.
The 'locmem' backend stores messages in a special attribute of the
django.core.mail module. The outbox attribute is created when the first
message is sent. It’s a list with an EmailMessage instance for each
message that would be sent. Messages in the outbox are annotated with a
sent_using attribute that identifies the MAILERS alias used to
send the message.
To use the in-memory backend, set BACKEND to
"django.core.mail.backends.locmem.EmailBackend". It does not support any
OPTIONS.
Django’s test runner automatically switches to this backend for testing.
This backend is not intended for use in production – it is provided as a convenience that can be used during development and testing.
The sent_using attribute was added to messages in the outbox.
As the name suggests the dummy backend does nothing with your messages. To use
it, set BACKEND to
"django.core.mail.backends.dummy.EmailBackend". It does not support any
OPTIONS.
This backend is not intended for use in production – it is provided as a convenience that can be used during development.
There are community-maintained solutions!
Django has a vibrant ecosystem. There are email backends highlighted on the Community Ecosystem page. The Django Packages Email grid has even more options for you!
Third-party email backends are available that:
Integrate directly with commercial email service providers’ APIs (which often have extra functionality not available through SMTP).
Offload email sending to asynchronous task queues.
Add features to other email backends, such as enforcing do-not-send lists or logging sent messages.
Provide development and debugging tools, such as sandbox capture and in-browser email previews.
If you need to change how emails are sent you can write your own email backend.
To use a custom backend, set BACKEND to the Python
import path for your backend class and OPTIONS to
any __init__() keyword arguments your backend supports.
Custom email backends should subclass BaseEmailBackend that is located in
the django.core.mail.backends.base module. A custom email backend must
implement the send_messages(email_messages) method. This method receives a
list of EmailMessage instances and returns the number of successfully
delivered messages. If your backend has any concept of a persistent session or
connection, you should also implement the open() and close() methods.
Refer to smtp.EmailBackend for a reference implementation.
The mailers factory in django.core.mail returns instances of email
backends.
You can access the mailers configured in the MAILERS setting
through a dict-like object: django.core.mail.mailers:
>>> from django.core.mail import mailers
>>> mailers["notifications"]
If the named key is not defined, a MailerDoesNotExist error will be
raised. Other configuration problems will raise an InvalidMailer error.
As a shortcut, the default mailer can be accessed through
django.core.mail.mailers.default:
>>> from django.core.mail import mailers
>>> mailers.default
This is equivalent to mailers["default"]. If no default mailer has
been configured, a MailerDoesNotExist error will be raised.
Deprecated since version 6.1: If the MAILERS setting is not defined, mailers.default
will create an email backend instance from the deprecated
EMAIL_BACKEND and related settings. This supports backward
compatibility with Django 6.0 and earlier.
This behavior (and those settings) will be removed in Django 7.0.
The deprecated django.core.mail.get_connection() function creates
and returns an instance of an email backend. Its behavior depends on the
MAILERS setting and how the function is called.
If the MAILERS setting is defined:
get_connection() with no arguments will return
mailers.default.
get_connection(...) called with only fail_silently or other
keyword arguments will create an instance of
MAILERS["default"] with any keywords added to the
default mailer’s OPTIONS.
get_connection(backend, ...) with a backend import path will raise
an error.
If the MAILERS setting is not defined:
get_connection() with no arguments will return an instance of the
email backend specified in EMAIL_BACKEND.
If you specify the backend argument, an instance of that backend will
be instantiated.
If the keyword argument fail_silently is True, certain
backend-dependent exceptions during the email sending process will be
silently ignored.
All other keyword arguments are passed directly to the constructor of the email backend.
Deprecated since version 6.0: Passing fail_silently as positional argument is deprecated.
Deprecated since version 6.1: get_connection() is deprecated and will be removed in Django
7.0. Switch to mailers[alias]. See
Replacing get_connection() and connection arguments for migration suggestions.
There are times when you do not want Django to send emails at all. For example, while developing a website, you probably don’t want to send out thousands of emails – but you may want to validate that emails will be sent to the right people under the right conditions, and that those emails will contain the correct content.
The easiest way to configure email for local development is to use the
console email backend. This backend
redirects all email to stdout, allowing you to inspect the content of mail.
The file email backend can also be useful during development – this backend dumps the contents of every SMTP connection to a file that can be inspected at your leisure.
Another approach is to use a mocked SMTP server that receives the emails locally and displays them to the terminal, but does not actually send anything. The aiosmtpd package provides a way to accomplish this:
python -m pip install "aiosmtpd >= 1.4.5"
python -m aiosmtpd -n -l localhost:8025
This command will start a minimal SMTP server listening on port 8025 of
localhost. This server prints to standard output all email headers and the
email body. You then only need to set an SMTP backend’s "host" and
"port" OPTIONS accordingly. For a more
detailed discussion of SMTP server options, see the documentation of the
aiosmtpd module.
For information about unit-testing the sending of emails in your application, see the Email services section of the testing documentation.
May 13, 2026