How to send emails using Django and Postfix?

XAP Software · May 21, 2022

Python   Django

In case you need to add a possibility of sending email notifications from your Django app and use Postfix mail transfer agent then this article will help you out.

Configure settings.py file

Firstly, you need to add following lines in settings.py file. You should insert host address in EMAIL_HOST variable and insert port in EMAIL_PORT. Notice, that the port of your local Postfix service is 25 by default.


EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_HOST = 'localhost'
EMAIL_PORT = 25
EMAIL_HOST_USER = ''
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = ''
EMAIL_USE_TLS = False
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = '<whatever@example.com>'

Sending emails

Now you need to open your views.py file and import send_mail function.

from django.core.mail import send_mail

For example, if you have a call-back form on the front-end and you send user’s data to your Django API on the back-end, you should rewrite the default create() method of View class. In order to show messages in Django admin panel you need to create an object of your Form class and save it using default function save().

class TestFormViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = TestForm.objects.all()
    serializer_class = TestFormSerializer

    def create(self, request):
        post_data = request.data

        message = "Email by '%s'\Message: '%s'\n" %
                                (post_data['name'], post_data['message'])

        from_addr = "no-reply@test.com"
        recipient_list = ["test@gmail.com"]
        send_mail("Test subject of an email", message, from_addr, recipient_list)


        new_form = TestForm.objects.create(name=post_data["name"], message=post_data["message"])

        new_form.save()

        serializer = TestFormSerializer(new_form)

        return Response(serializer.data)

Now you can see that using create() function you receive data from the front-end and create a message using this data. Also, you can fill in from_addr field with address which will be used by Postfix to send email. The field recipient_list is used for specifying recipients of your email. As a result, you send messages using function send_mail() in accordance with these params.

Note that you need to set up Postfix configuration before using the method above.

Kobenko Vladislav

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