E mail notifications

The CodaLab web site requires the ability to send e-mails when a user forgets her password and requests a password reset.

We use the "SendGrid add-on to Windows Azure" to send e-mails via SMTP.

The SendGrid developer's documentation explains how to integrate the e-mail service in Django. In addition, the Django project provides comprehensive documentation: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/email/. Additional notes are collected below.

Settings

The key settings which affect how e-mailing works are:

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.sendgrid.net'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = '<insert username>'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = '<insert password>'
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = 'info@codalab.org'
SERVER_EMAIL = 'info@codalab.org'

The Site configuration also plays a role because it defines the domain name associated with the web site. The site domain name and a human-readable name of the web site are defined in the settings by:

CODALAB_SITE_DOMAIN = 'codalab.org'
CODALAB_SITE_NAME = 'CodaLab'

The initialize.py script inserts these names in the database. Recall that initialize.py is located in codalab/scripts and is used to insert constants into the database. To illustrate how the site info is used, consider the e-mail sent to a user resetting his password:

Subject: [CodaLab] Password Reset E-mail
From: info@codalab.org
To: someuser@somewhere.com
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 22:42:55 -0000

You're receiving this e-mail because you or someone else has requested a password 
for your user account at codalab.org. It can be safely ignored if you did not request 
a password reset. Click the link below to reset your password.

http://codalab.org/accounts/password/reset/key/1-3le-6640241efe4e5b77f4e5/

In case you forgot, your username is someuser.

Thanks for using our site!

The subject field of the e-mail uses the verbase name of the site, while the body of the e-mail includes several references to codalab.org which is given by the site's domain name.

Testing without sending e-mails

As noted in the Django documentation, one can avoid sending e-mails during development but still see them in the console by setting:

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'

This is the default configuration for the base Dev configuration.