Abderrahmane Mustapha

Posted on May 24, 2020 • Updated on Sep 11, 2020

Send emails with Django and Gmail , a better way

#django #python #webdev #discuss

In this post I want to talk about how can we send emails using Django and Gmail, I read a lot of articles about this but none of them is working for me, this is my way of doing this

Setup Django 💚

first let's install django

 pip install django

start a django project

django-admin startproject send_gmail

start a django app

cd send_gmail
python manage.py  startapp send

add the app to settings.py installed app

# send_gmail/settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = [
...
send,
]

migrate and create a super user

python manage.py  migrate
python manage.py createsuperuser

check this post if you want to know more about how to create a virtual environment , or how to install Django and start your project

The Gmail part ✉

now you need to create a Gmail account and then click on Manage your google account

now click on the Security tab

make sure to enable two steps verification

now click on App passwords

you have to type your password again

click on select app choose *** other (Custome Name) *** and give a name to you app

the last step click on generate and Gmail will generate a key or an app password make sure to copy this key or save it in a text file

Edit your settings.py file

#gmail_send/settings.py
EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.gmail.com'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'yoorusername@gmail.com'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'key' #past the key or password app here
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = 'default from email'

🎉🎉 now you are ready to send emails with Django and Gmail in production🎉🎉

For further exploration

you can use SendGrid, Mailgun, Sendinblue... for your apps too
don't forget to put your key in a .env file

Top comments (25)

Jeroen Jacobs • May 25 '20

I do it a bit differently: I run PostFix on my servers, which is configured to use an external SMTP server as forwarder (can be GMail, SES, ...). Then I let my app deliver to my local SMTP server.

This has a few advantages:

App is no longer coupled to GMail settings
The most important one: mails will be queued on local server, in case remote SMTP goes down or is not available. Most SMTP servers already handle automatic retries, and dead mail queues out of the box.

If you do it within the Django app, I would suggest to add some message queue stuff (Celery) so SMTP calls don't block your app, or retry in case of failure.

Abderrahmane Mustapha • May 25 '20

that's great thank you will try to implement this

Jordan Haines • May 24 '20

Great post! Adding on to your note RE further exploration. For projects that outgrow sending email via a single Gmail account, check out github.com/anymail/django-anymail. After playing with a few packages to interact with Mandrill/Sendgrid/SES, I've found Anymail to be the most flexible.

Abderrahmane Mustapha • May 24 '20

thank you I didn't know about django-anymail i think that I will use it with my next project

Albert Gubanja • Nov 17 '22 • Edited

Hello,
I want to send email contact with django,
But after all config in settings.py, I am facing this issue:

SMTPSenderRefused at /contacts (530, b'5.7.0 Must issue a STARTTLS command first. m42-20020a05600c3b2a00b003cf47556f21sm7462655wms.2 - gsmtp', 'webmaster@localhost')

Can anyone help me?
Here is my settings.py

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.gmail.com'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'albertandemsj@gmail.com'
EMAIL_PASSWORD = 'key'
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_USE_TSL = True
EMAIL_USE_SSL = False

And my sending email view.py

if request.method == 'POST':
        name = request.POST.get('name')
        email = request.POST.get('email')
        subject = request.POST.get('subject')
        message = request.POST.get('comments')

        data = {
            'name':name,
            'email': email,
            'subject': subject,
            'message': message
        }

        message = ''' 
        New Message : {}

        From : {}
        '''.format(data['message'], data['email'])

        send_mail(data['subject'], message,'' ,['qweaverinfo@gmail.com'])
        return render(request, 'layouts/auth-signup-success.html', locals())

    return render(request, 'layouts/contact.html', locals())

Javier Contreras • Jan 15 '21

Hello, thanks for sharing your knowledge, I have a question, I have a contact form, I am using a gmail account to send, but I want the email of the person who writes to appear as the sender and not my gmail account, it is can you do this?

Oussama Heloulou • Jul 2 '21

Should this work properly and don't cause any problems if I send 30 emails per day?

giftedstan • Apr 8 '22

yes, you can send up to 2000 mails per day

Oussama Heloulou • Apr 9 '22

Thank you for your reply.
I used it to send emails from the website to users, but it stopped working, (it works if I try to send from my PC, but doesn't work from the server)