django-mailer is a reusable Django app for queuing the sending of email. It works by storing email in the database for later sending. This has a number of advantages:
- robustness - if your email provider goes down or has a temporary error, the email won’t be lost. In addition, since the
send_mail()call always succeeds (unless your database is out of action), then the HTTP request that triggered the email to be sent won’t crash, and any ongoing transaction won’t be rolled back. - correctness - when an outgoing email is created as part of a transaction, since it is stored in the database it will participate in transactions. This means it won’t be sent until the transaction is committed, and won’t be sent at all if the transaction is rolled back.
In addition, if you want to ensure that mails are sent very quickly, and without heaving polling, django-mailer comes with a PostgreSQL specific runmailer_pg command. This uses PostgreSQL’s NOTIFY/LISTEN feature to be able to send emails as soon as they are added to the queue.
File attachments are also temporarily stored in the database, which means if you are sending files larger than several hundred KB in size, you are likely to run into database limitations on how large your query can be. If this happens, you'll either need to fall back to using Django's default mail backend, or increase your database limits (a procedure that depends on which database you are using).
With django-mailer, you can’t know in a Django view function whether the email has actually been sent or not - the send_mail function just stores mail on the queue to be sent later.
django-mailer was developed as part of the Pinax ecosystem but is just a Django app and can be used independently of other Pinax apps.
- Django >= 2.2
- Databases: django-mailer supports all databases that Django supports, with the following notes:
- SQLite: you may experience 'database is locked' errors if the
send_mailcommand runs when anything else is attempting to put items on the queue. For this reason SQLite is not recommended for use with django-mailer. - MySQL: the developers don’t test against MySQL.
- SQLite: you may experience 'database is locked' errors if the
See usage.rst in the docs.
The Pinax documentation is available at http://pinaxproject.com/pinax/.
This is an Open Source project maintained by volunteers, and outside this documentation the maintainers do not offer other support. For cases where you have found a bug you can file a GitHub issue. In case of any questions we recommend you join the Pinax Slack team and ping the Pinax team there instead of creating an issue on GitHub. You may also be able to get help on other programming sites like Stack Overflow.
See CONTRIBUTING.rst for information about contributing patches to django-mailer.
See this blog post including a video, or our How to Contribute section for an overview on how contributing to Pinax works. For concrete contribution ideas, please see our Ways to Contribute/What We Need Help With section.
We also highly recommend reading our Open Source and Self-Care blog post.
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