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 >= 1.10
• django-jsonfield

Installation

• Install from PyPI (or you 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(
    'recipient@example.com', # List of email addresses also accepted
    'from@example.com',
    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(
    'recipient@example.com', # List of email addresses also accepted
    'from@example.com',
    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)

or, if you use uWSGI as application server, 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 is very useful in environments, such as Docker containers, where you don't have a running cron-daemon.

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 is allowed (John <john@a.com>)
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
language	No	Language in which you want to send the email in (if you have multilingual email templates.)
cc	No	list emails, will appear in cc field
bcc	No	list of emails, will appear in bcc field
attachments	No	Email attachments - A dictionary where the keys are the filenames and the values are either: files file-like objects full path of the file
context	No	A dictionary, 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
priority	No	high, medium, low or now (send_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. This way content is never stored in the DB. May result in significant space savings.

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'),
        '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(
    ['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
)

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, from_email, to_email = "Hello", "Plain text body", "no-reply@example.com", "john@example.com"
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", "no-reply@example.com", "john@example.com"
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:

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:

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 or -da	Flag to delete orphaned attachment records and files on disk. If flag does not exist, attachments will be ignored by the cleanup.

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'
}

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"
        },
    },
}

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': '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().

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 with:

tox

or:

python setup.py test

Changelog

Full changelog can be found here.

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