Django Post Office

Django Post Office is a simple app to send and manage your emails in Django. Some awesome features are:

• Allows you to send email asynchronously
• Multi backend support
• Supports HTML email
• Supports inlined images in HTML email
• Supports database based email templates
• Supports multilingual email templates (i18n)
• Built in scheduling support
• Works well with task queues like RQ or Celery
• Uses multiprocessing (and threading) to send a large number of emails in parallel

Dependencies

• django >= 2.2
• jsonfield

Optional Dependency

• bleach

With this optional dependency, HTML emails are nicely rendered inside the Django admin backend. Without this library, all HTML tags will otherwise be stripped for security reasons.

Installation

Install from PyPI (or manually download from 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 migrate:

python manage.py migrate

Set post_office.EmailBackend as your EMAIL_BACKEND in Django's settings.py:

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'post_office.EmailBackend'

Quickstart

Send a simple email is really easy:

from post_office import mail

mail.send(
    '[email protected]', # List of email addresses also accepted
    '[email protected]',
    subject='My email',
    message='Hi there!',
    html_message='Hi <strong>there</strong>!',
)

If you want to use templates, ensure that Django's admin interface is enabled. Create an EmailTemplate instance via admin and do the following:

from post_office import mail

mail.send(
    '[email protected]', # List of email addresses also accepted
    '[email protected]',
    template='welcome_email', # Could be an EmailTemplate instance or name
    context={'foo': 'bar'},
)

The above command will put your email on the queue so you can use the command in your webapp without slowing down the request/response cycle too much. To actually send them out, run python manage.py send_queued_mail. You can schedule this management command to run regularly via cron:

* * * * * (/usr/bin/python manage.py send_queued_mail >> send_mail.log 2>&1)

Usage

mail.send()

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

Argument	Required	Description
recipients	Yes	List of recipient email addresses
sender	No	Defaults to settings.DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL, display name like John <[email protected]> is allowed
subject	No	Email subject (if template is not specified)
message	No	Email content (if template is not specified)
html_message	No	HTML content (if template is not specified)
template	No	EmailTemplate instance or name of template
language	No	Language in which you want to send the email in (if you have multilingual email templates).
cc	No	List of emails, will appear in cc field
bcc	No	List of emails, will appear in bcc field
attachments	No	Email attachments - a dict where the keys are the filenames and the values are files, file-like-objects or path to file
context	No	A dict, used to render templated email
headers	No	A dictionary of extra headers on the message
scheduled_time	No	A date/datetime object indicating when the email should be sent
expires_at	No	If specified, mails that are not yet sent won't be delivered after this date.
priority	No	high, medium, low or now (sent immediately)
backend	No	Alias of the backend you want to use, default will be used if not specified.
render_on_delivery	No	Setting this to True causes email to be lazily rendered during delivery. template is required when render_on_delivery is True. With this option, the full email content is never stored in the DB. May result in significant space savings if you're sending many emails using the same template.

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(
    ['[email protected]'],
    '[email protected]',
    subject='Welcome!',
    message='Welcome home, {{ name }}!',
    html_message='Welcome home, <b>{{ name }}</b>!',
    headers={'Reply-to': '[email protected]'},
    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(
    ['[email protected]'],
    '[email protected]',
    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(
    ['[email protected]'],
    '[email protected]',
    template='welcome_email',
    context={'foo': 'bar'},
    priority='now',
    attachments={
        'attachment1.doc': '/path/to/file/file1.doc',
        'attachment2.txt': ContentFile('file content'),
        'attachment3.txt': {'file': ContentFile('file content'), 'mimetype': 'text/plain'},
    }
)

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(
    ['[email protected]'],
    '[email protected]',
    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 languages. 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 similarly easy:

mail.send(
    ['[email protected]'],
    '[email protected]',
    template=template, # Sends using the default template
)

mail.send(
    ['[email protected]'],
    '[email protected]',
    template=template,
    language='id', # Sends using Indonesian template
)

Inlined Images

Often one wants to render images inside a template, which are attached as inlined MIMEImage to the outgoing email. This requires a slightly modified Django Template Engine, keeping a list of inlined images, which later will be added to the outgoing message.

First we must add a special Django template backend to our list of template engines:

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        ...
    }, {
        'BACKEND': 'post_office.template.backends.post_office.PostOfficeTemplates',
        'APP_DIRS': True,
        'DIRS': [],
        'OPTIONS': {
            'context_processors': [
                'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
                'django.template.context_processors.debug',
                'django.template.context_processors.i18n',
                'django.template.context_processors.media',
                'django.template.context_processors.static',
                'django.template.context_processors.tz',
                'django.template.context_processors.request',
            ]
        }
    }
]

then we must tell Post-Office to use this template engine:

POST_OFFICE = {
    'TEMPLATE_ENGINE': 'post_office',
}

In templates used to render HTML for emails add

{% load post_office %}

<p>... somewhere in the body ...</p>
<img src="{% inline_image 'path/to/image.png' %}" />

Here the templatetag named inline_image is used to keep track of inlined images. It takes a single parameter. This can either be the relative path to an image file located in one of the static directories, or the absolute path to an image file, or an image-file object itself. Templates rendered using this templatetag, render a reference ID for each given image, and store these images inside the context of the adopted template engine. Later on, when the rendered template is passed to the mailing library, those images will be transferred to the email message object as MIMEImage-attachments.

To send an email containing both, a plain text body and some HTML with inlined images, use the following code snippet:

from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives

subject, body = "Hello", "Plain text body"
from_email, to_email = "[email protected]", "[email protected]"
email_message = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, body, from_email, [to_email])
template = get_template('email-template-name.html', using='post_office')
context = {...}
html = template.render(context)
email_message.attach_alternative(html, 'text/html')
template.attach_related(email_message)
email_message.send()

To send an email containing HTML with inlined images, but without a plain text body, use this code snippet:

from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives

subject, from_email, to_email = "Hello", "[email protected]", "[email protected]"
template = get_template('email-template-name.html', using='post_office')
context = {...}
html = template.render(context)
email_message = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, html, from_email, [to_email])
email_message.content_subtype = 'html'
template.attach_related(email_message)
email_message.send()

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:

# Put this in settings.py
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(
    ['[email protected]'],
    '[email protected]',
    subject='Hello',
)

# If you want to send using `ses` backend
mail.send(
    ['[email protected]'],
    '[email protected]',
    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:

Argument	Description
--processes or -p	Number of parallel processes to send email. Defaults to 1
--lockfile or -L	Full path to file used as lock file. Defaults to /tmp/post_office.lock

• cleanup_mail - delete all emails created before an X number of days (defaults to 90).

Argument	Description
--days or -d	Email older than this argument will be deleted. Defaults to 90
--delete-attachments	Flag to delete orphaned attachment records and files on disk. If not specified, attachments won't be deleted.

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 --delete-attachments >> $PROJECT/cron_mail_cleanup.log 2>&1)

Settings

This section outlines all the settings and configurations that you can put in Django's settings.py to fine tune post-office's behavior.

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': 50,
}

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',
}

Override Recipients

Defaults to None. This option is useful if you want to redirect all emails to specified a few email for development purposes.

# Put this in settings.py
POST_OFFICE = {
    ...
    'OVERRIDE_RECIPIENTS': ['[email protected]', '[email protected]'],
}

Message-ID

The SMTP standard requires that each email contains a unique Message-ID. Typically the Message-ID consists of two parts separated by the @ symbol: The left part is a generated pseudo random number. The right part is a constant string, typically denoting the full qualified domain name of the sending server.

By default, Django generates such a Message-ID during email delivery. Since django-post_office keeps track of all delivered emails, it can be very useful to create and store this Message-ID while creating each email in the database. This identifier then can be looked up in the Django admin backend.

To enable this feature, add this to your Post-Office settings:

# Put this in settings.py
POST_OFFICE = {
    ...
    'MESSAGE_ID_ENABLED': True,
}

It can further be fine tuned, using for instance another full qualified domain name:

# Put this in settings.py
POST_OFFICE = {
    ...
    'MESSAGE_ID_ENABLED': True,
    'MESSAGE_ID_FQDN': 'example.com',
}

Otherwise, if MESSAGE_ID_FQDN is unset (the default), django-post_office falls back to the DNS name of the server, which is determined by the network settings of the host.

Retry

Not activated by default. You can automatically requeue failed email deliveries. You can also configure failed deliveries to be retried after a specific time interval.

# Put this in settings.py
POST_OFFICE = {
    ...
    'MAX_RETRIES': 4,
    'RETRY_INTERVAL': datetime.timedelta(minutes=15),  # Schedule to be retried 15 minutes later
}

Log Level

Logs are stored in the database and is browseable via Django admin. 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"
        },
    },
}

Threads

post-office >= 3.0 allows you to use multiple threads to dramatically speed up the speed at which emails are sent. By default, post-office uses 5 threads per process. You can tweak this setting by changing THREADS_PER_PROCESS setting.

This may dramatically increase the speed of bulk email delivery, depending on which email backends you use. In my tests, multi threading speeds up email backends that use HTTP based (REST) delivery mechanisms but doesn't seem to help SMTP based backends.

# Put this in settings.py
POST_OFFICE = {
    ...
    'THREADS_PER_PROCESS': 10,
}

Performance

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': '[email protected]',
    'recipients': ['[email protected]'],
    'subject': 'Hi!',
    'message': 'Hi Alice!'
}
second_email = {
    'sender': '[email protected]',
    'recipients': ['[email protected]'],
    'subject': 'Hi!',
    'message': 'Hi Bob!'
}
kwargs_list = [first_email, second_email]

mail.send_many(kwargs_list)

Attachments are not supported with mail.send_many().

Running Tests

To run the test suite:

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

You can run the full test suite for all supported versions of Django and Python with:

tox

or:

python setup.py test

Integration with Celery

If your Django project runs in a Celery enabled configuration, you can use its worker to send out queued emails. Compared to the solution with cron (see above), or the solution with uWSGI timers (see below) this setup has the big advantage that queued emails are send immediately after they have been added to the mail queue. The delivery is still performed in a separate and asynchronous task, which prevents sending emails during the request/response-cycle.

If you configured Celery in your project and started the Celery worker, you should see something such as:

--------------- [email protected] v4.0 (latentcall)
--- ***** -----
-- ******* ---- [Configuration]
- *** --- * --- . broker:      amqp://guest@localhost:5672//
- ** ---------- . app:         __main__:0x1012d8590
- ** ---------- . concurrency: 8 (processes)
- ** ---------- . events:      OFF (enable -E to monitor this worker)
- ** ----------
- *** --- * --- [Queues]
-- ******* ---- . celery:      exchange:celery(direct) binding:celery
--- ***** -----

[tasks]
. post_office.tasks.cleanup_expired_mails
. post_office.tasks.send_queued_mail

Delivering emails through the Celery worker must be explicitly enabled:

# Put this in settings.py
POST_OFFICE = {
    ...
    'CELERY_ENABLED': True,
}

Emails will then be delivered immediately after they have been queued. In order to make this happen, the project's celery.py setup shall invoke the autodiscoverttasks function. In case of a temporary delivery failure, we might want retrying to send those emails by a periodic task. This can be scheduled with a simple Celery beat configuration, for instance through

app.conf.beat_schedule = {
    'send-queued-mail': {
        'task': 'post_office.tasks.send_queued_mail',
        'schedule': 600.0,
    },
}

The email queue now will be processed every 10 minutes. If you are using Django Celery Beat, then use the Django-Admin backend and add a periodic taks for post_office.tasks.send_queued_mail.

Depending on your policy, you may also want to remove expired emails from the queue. This can be done by adding another periodic taks for post_office.tasks.cleanup_mail, which may run once a week or month.

Integration with uWSGI

If setting up Celery is too daunting and you use uWSGI as application server, then uWSGI decorators can act as a poor men's scheduler. Just add this short snipped to the project's wsgi.py file:

from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application

application = get_wsgi_application()

# add this block of code
try:
    import uwsgidecorators
    from django.core.management import call_command

    @uwsgidecorators.timer(10)
    def send_queued_mail(num):
        """Send queued mail every 10 seconds"""
        call_command('send_queued_mail', processes=1)

except ImportError:
    print("uwsgidecorators not found. Cron and timers are disabled")

Alternatively you can also use the decorator @uwsgidecorators.cron(minute, hour, day, month, weekday). This will schedule a task at specific times. Use -1 to signal any time, it corresponds to the * in cron.

Please note that uwsgidecorators are available only, if the application has been started with uWSGI. However, Django's internal ./manange.py runserver also access this file, therefore wrap the block into an exception handler as shown above.

This configuration can be useful in environments, such as Docker containers, where you don't have a running cron-daemon.

Signals

Each time an email is added to the mail queue, Post Office emits a special Django signal. Whenever a third party application wants to be informed about this event, it shall connect a callback function to the Post Office's signal handler email_queued, for instance:

from django.dispatch import receiver
from post_office.signals import email_queued

@receiver(email_queued)
def my_callback(sender, emails, **kwargs):
    print("Added {} mails to the sending queue".format(len(emails)))

The Emails objects added to the queue are passed as list to the callback handler.

Changelog

Full changelog can be found here.

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