Django provides wrappers for Python’s email and smtplib modules
to simplify composing and sending email. Django’s email framework also supports
swapping in different delivery mechanisms: you can direct email to the console
or a file during development, or use community-maintained solutions for sending
email directly through commercial email service providers.
The code lives in the django.core.mail module.
Use send_mail() for straightforward email sending. For example, to send a
plain text message:
from django.core.mail import send_mail
send_mail(
"Subject here",
"Here is the message.",
"from@example.com",
["to@example.com"],
)
When additional email sending functionality is needed, use the
EmailMessage or EmailMultiAlternatives
class. For example, to send a multipart email that includes both HTML and plain
text versions with a specific template and custom headers, you can use the
following approach:
from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
from django.template.loader import render_to_string
# First, render the plain text content.
text_content = render_to_string(
"templates/emails/my_email.txt",
context={"my_variable": 42},
)
# Secondly, render the HTML content.
html_content = render_to_string(
"templates/emails/my_email.html",
context={"my_variable": 42},
)
# Then, create a multipart email instance.
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(
subject="Subject here",
body=text_content,
from_email="from@example.com",
to=["to@example.com"],
headers={"List-Unsubscribe": "<mailto:unsub@example.com>"},
)
# Lastly, attach the HTML content to the email instance and send.
msg.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
msg.send()
By default, Django tries to send email by connecting to an SMTP server
running on localhost, with no authentication. If that doesn’t match your
production environment, trying to send email will raise an error like
connection refused or authentication failed, or cause a connection
timeout. You will need to adjust Django’s email settings to reflect your
environment.
Django abstracts the email sending process into an email backend class. The EMAIL_BACKEND setting controls
which backend Django uses.
The default email backend is Django’s SMTP backend, which
connects to an SMTP server using the host and port specified in the
EMAIL_HOST and EMAIL_PORT settings. The
EMAIL_HOST_USER and EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD settings, if
set, are used to authenticate to the SMTP server, and the
EMAIL_USE_TLS and EMAIL_USE_SSL settings control whether
a secure connection is used.
SMTP is supported by nearly all email service providers (ESPs) and many hosting environments. But there are other options: many commercial ESPs offer HTTP APIs with additional sending features, and during development or testing you might not want to send email at all. Email backends lists several possibilities.
django.core.mail provides functions for conveniently sending email, as
well as classes for building and sending more complex email messages with
attachments and multiple content types.
Note
The character set of email sent with django.core.mail will be set to
the value of your DEFAULT_CHARSET setting.
send_mail()¶django.core.mail.send_mail() sends a single email message.
The subject, message, from_email and recipient_list parameters
are required.
subject: A string.
message: A string.
from_email: A string. If None, Django will use the value of the
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL setting.
recipient_list: A list of strings, each an email address. Each
member of recipient_list will see the other recipients in the “To:”
field of the email message.
The following parameters are optional, and must be given as keyword arguments if used.
fail_silently: A boolean. When it’s False, send_mail() will raise
an smtplib.SMTPException if an error occurs. See the smtplib
docs for a list of possible exceptions, all of which are subclasses of
SMTPException.
auth_user: The optional username to use to authenticate to the SMTP
server. If this isn’t provided, Django will use the value of the
EMAIL_HOST_USER setting.
auth_password: The optional password to use to authenticate to the
SMTP server. If this isn’t provided, Django will use the value of the
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD setting.
connection: The optional email backend to use to send the mail.
If unspecified, an instance of the default backend will be used.
See the documentation on Email backends
for more details.
html_message: If html_message is provided, the resulting email will
be a multipart/alternative email with message as the
text/plain content type and html_message as the
text/html content type.
The return value will be the number of successfully delivered messages (which
can be 0 or 1 since it can only send one message).
Deprecated since version 6.0: Passing fail_silently and later parameters as positional arguments is
deprecated.
Older versions ignored fail_silently=True, auth_user,
and auth_password when a connection was also provided.
This now raises a TypeError.
send_mass_mail()¶django.core.mail.send_mass_mail() is intended to handle mass emailing.
datatuple is a tuple in which each element is in this format:
(subject, message, from_email, recipient_list)
fail_silently, auth_user, auth_password and connection have the
same functions as in send_mail(). They must be given as keyword arguments
if used.
Each separate element of datatuple results in a separate email message.
As in send_mail(), recipients in the same recipient_list will all see
the other addresses in the email messages’ “To:” field.
For example, the following code would send two different messages to two different sets of recipients; however, only one connection to the mail server would be opened:
message1 = (
"Subject here",
"Here is the message",
"from@example.com",
["first@example.com", "other@example.com"],
)
message2 = (
"Another Subject",
"Here is another message",
"from@example.com",
["second@test.com"],
)
send_mass_mail((message1, message2), fail_silently=False)
The return value will be the number of successfully delivered messages.
Deprecated since version 6.0: Passing fail_silently and later parameters as positional arguments is
deprecated.
Older versions ignored fail_silently=True, auth_user,
and auth_password when a connection was also provided.
This now raises a TypeError.
send_mass_mail() vs. send_mail()¶The main difference between send_mass_mail() and repeatedly calling
send_mail() is that send_mail() opens a connection to the mail
server each time it’s executed, while send_mass_mail() uses a single
connection for all of its messages. This makes send_mass_mail() slightly
more efficient.
send_mail() with multiple to addresses sends a single email message,
with john@example.com and jane@example.com both appearing in the “To:”
field:
send_mail(
"Subject",
"Message.",
"from@example.com",
["john@example.com", "jane@example.com"],
)
send_mass_mail() sends a separate message per datatuple element, so
john@example.com and jane@example.com each receive their own email:
datatuple = (
("Subject", "Message.", "from@example.com", ["john@example.com"]),
("Subject", "Message.", "from@example.com", ["jane@example.com"]),
)
send_mass_mail(datatuple)
mail_admins()¶django.core.mail.mail_admins() is a shortcut for sending an email to the
site admins, as defined in the ADMINS setting.
mail_admins() prefixes the subject with the value of the
EMAIL_SUBJECT_PREFIX setting, which is "[Django] " by default.
The “From:” header of the email will be the value of the
SERVER_EMAIL setting.
This method exists for convenience and readability.
If html_message is provided, the resulting email will be a
multipart/alternative email with message as the
text/plain content type and html_message as the
text/html content type.
Deprecated since version 6.0: Passing fail_silently and later parameters as positional arguments is
deprecated.
Older versions ignored fail_silently=True when a connection
was also provided. This now raises a TypeError.
mail_managers()¶django.core.mail.mail_managers() is just like mail_admins(), except it
sends an email to the site managers, as defined in the MANAGERS
setting.
Deprecated since version 6.0: Passing fail_silently and later parameters as positional arguments is
deprecated.
Older versions ignored fail_silently=True when a connection
was also provided. This now raises a TypeError.
EmailMessage class¶Django’s send_mail() and send_mass_mail() functions are actually
thin wrappers that make use of the EmailMessage class.
Not all features of the EmailMessage class are available through the
send_mail() and related wrapper functions. If you wish to use advanced
features, such as BCC’ed recipients, file attachments, or multi-part email,
you’ll need to create EmailMessage instances directly.
Note
This is a design feature. send_mail() and related functions were
originally the only interface Django provided. However, the list of
parameters they accepted was slowly growing over time. It made sense to
move to a more object-oriented design for email messages and retain the
original functions only for backwards compatibility.
EmailMessage is responsible for creating the email message itself. The
email backend is then responsible for sending the
email.
For convenience, EmailMessage provides a send()
method for sending a single email. If you need to send multiple messages, the
email backend API provides an alternative.
The EmailMessage class is initialized with the following
parameters. All parameters are optional and can be set at any time prior
to calling the send() method.
The first four parameters can be passed as positional or keyword arguments, but must be in the given order if positional arguments are used:
subject: The subject line of the email.
body: The body text. This should be a plain text message.
from_email: The sender’s address. Both fred@example.com and
"Fred" <fred@example.com> forms are legal. If omitted, the
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL setting is used.
to: A list or tuple of recipient addresses.
The following parameters must be given as keyword arguments if used:
cc: A list or tuple of recipient addresses used in the “Cc” header
when sending the email.
bcc: A list or tuple of addresses used in the “Bcc” header when
sending the email.
reply_to: A list or tuple of recipient addresses used in the
“Reply-To” header when sending the email.
attachments: A list of attachments to put on the message. Each can
be an instance of MIMEPart or
EmailAttachment, or a tuple with attributes
(filename, content, mimetype).
Support for MIMEPart objects in the
attachments list was added.
headers: A dictionary of extra headers to put on the message. The
keys are the header name, values are the header values. It’s up to the
caller to ensure header names and values are in the correct format for
an email message. The corresponding attribute is extra_headers.
connection: An email backend instance.
Use this parameter if you are sending the EmailMessage via
send() and you want to use the same connection for multiple
messages. If omitted, a new connection is created when send() is
called. This parameter is ignored when using
send_messages().
Deprecated since version 6.0: Passing all except the first four parameters as positional arguments is deprecated.
For example:
from django.core.mail import EmailMessage
email = EmailMessage(
subject="Hello",
body="Body goes here",
from_email="from@example.com",
to=["to1@example.com", "to2@example.com"],
bcc=["bcc@example.com"],
reply_to=["another@example.com"],
headers={"Message-ID": "foo"},
)
The class has the following methods:
Sends the message. If a connection was specified when the email was
constructed, that connection will be used. Otherwise, an instance of
the default backend will be instantiated and used. If the keyword
argument fail_silently is True, exceptions raised while sending
the message will be quashed. An empty list of recipients will not raise
an exception. It will return 1 if the message was sent
successfully, otherwise 0.
Older versions ignored fail_silently=True when a connection
was also provided. This now raises a TypeError.
Constructs and returns a Python email.message.EmailMessage
object representing the message to be sent.
The keyword argument policy allows specifying the set of rules for
updating and serializing the representation of the message. It must be
an email.policy.Policy object. Defaults to
email.policy.default. In certain cases you may want to use
SMTP, SMTPUTF8 or a custom
policy. For example,
django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend uses the
SMTP policy to ensure \r\n line endings as
required by the SMTP protocol.
If you ever need to extend Django’s EmailMessage class,
you’ll probably want to override this method to put the content you
want into the Python EmailMessage object.
The policy keyword argument was added and the return type was
updated to an instance of EmailMessage.
Returns a list of all the recipients of the message, whether they’re
recorded in the to, cc or bcc attributes. This is another
method you might need to override when subclassing, because the SMTP
server needs to be told the full list of recipients when the message
is sent. If you add another way to specify recipients in your class,
they need to be returned from this method as well.
Creates a new attachment and adds it to the message. There are two ways
to call attach():
You can pass it three arguments: filename, content and
mimetype. filename is the name of the file attachment as it
will appear in the email, content is the data that will be
contained inside the attachment and mimetype is the optional MIME
type for the attachment. If you omit mimetype, the MIME content
type will be guessed from the filename of the attachment.
For example:
message.attach("design.png", img_data, "image/png")
If you specify a mimetype of message/rfc822,
content can be a django.core.mail.EmailMessage or
Python’s email.message.EmailMessage or
email.message.Message.
For a mimetype starting with text/, content is
expected to be a string. Binary data will be decoded using UTF-8,
and if that fails, the MIME type will be changed to
application/octet-stream and the data will be attached
unchanged.
Or for attachments requiring additional headers or parameters, you
can pass attach() a single Python
MIMEPart object. This will be attached
directly to the resulting message. For example, to attach an inline
image with a Content-ID:
import email.utils
from email.message import MIMEPart
from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
message = EmailMultiAlternatives(...)
image_data_bytes = ... # Load image as bytes
# Create a random Content-ID, including angle brackets
cid = email.utils.make_msgid()
inline_image = email.message.MIMEPart()
inline_image.set_content(
image_data_bytes,
maintype="image",
subtype="png", # or "jpeg", etc. depending on the image type
disposition="inline",
cid=cid,
)
message.attach(inline_image)
# Refer to Content-ID in HTML without angle brackets
message.attach_alternative(f'… <img src="cid:{cid[1:-1]}"> …', "text/html")
Python’s email.contentmanager.set_content() documentation
describes the supported arguments for MIMEPart.set_content().
Support for MIMEPart attachments was
added.
Deprecated since version 6.0: Support for email.mime.base.MIMEBase attachments is
deprecated. Use MIMEPart instead.
Creates a new attachment using a file from your filesystem. Call it with the path of the file to attach and, optionally, the MIME type to use for the attachment. If the MIME type is omitted, it will be guessed from the filename. You can use it like this:
message.attach_file("/images/weather_map.png")
For MIME types starting with text/, binary data is handled
as in attach().
A named tuple to store attachments to an email.
The named tuple has the following indexes:
filename
content
mimetype
It can be useful to include multiple versions of the content in an email; the
classic example is to send both text and HTML versions of a message. With
Django’s email library, you can do this using the
EmailMultiAlternatives class.
A subclass of EmailMessage that allows additional versions of the
message body in the email via the attach_alternative() method. This
directly inherits all methods (including the class initialization) from
EmailMessage.
A list of EmailAlternative named tuples.
This is particularly useful in tests:
self.assertEqual(len(msg.alternatives), 1)
self.assertEqual(msg.alternatives[0].content, html_content)
self.assertEqual(msg.alternatives[0].mimetype, "text/html")
Alternatives should only be added using the attach_alternative()
method, or passed to the constructor.
Attach an alternative representation of the message body in the email.
For example, to send a text and HTML combination, you could write:
from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
subject = "hello"
from_email = "from@example.com"
to = "to@example.com"
text_content = "This is an important message."
html_content = "<p>This is an <strong>important</strong> message.</p>"
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, text_content, from_email, [to])
msg.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
msg.send()
Returns a boolean indicating whether the provided text is
contained in the email body and in all attached MIME type
text/* alternatives.
This can be useful when testing emails. For example:
def test_contains_email_content(self):
subject = "Hello World"
from_email = "from@example.com"
to = "to@example.com"
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, "I am content.", from_email, [to])
msg.attach_alternative("<p>I am content.</p>", "text/html")
self.assertIs(msg.body_contains("I am content"), True)
self.assertIs(msg.body_contains("<p>I am content.</p>"), False)
A named tuple to store alternative versions of email content.
The named tuple has the following indexes:
content
mimetype
By default, the MIME type of the body parameter in an EmailMessage
is "text/plain". It is good practice to leave this alone, because it
guarantees that any recipient will be able to read the email, regardless of
their mail client. However, if you are confident that your recipients can
handle an alternative content type, you can use the content_subtype
attribute on the EmailMessage class to change the main content type.
The major type will always be "text", but you can change the subtype. For
example:
msg = EmailMessage(subject, html_content, from_email, [to])
msg.content_subtype = "html" # Main content is now text/html
msg.send()
Header injection is a security exploit in which an attacker inserts extra email headers to control the “To:” and “From:” in email messages that your scripts generate.
The Django email functions outlined above all protect against header injection
by forbidding newlines in header values. If any subject, from_email or
recipient_list contains a newline (in either Unix, Windows or Mac style),
the email function (e.g. send_mail()) will raise ValueError and,
hence, will not send the email. It’s your responsibility to validate all data
before passing it to the email functions.
If a message contains headers at the start of the string, the headers will
be printed as the first bit of the email message.
Here’s an example view that takes a subject, message and from_email
from the request’s POST data, sends that to admin@example.com and redirects
to “/contact/thanks/” when it’s done:
from django.core.mail import send_mail
from django.http import HttpResponse, HttpResponseRedirect
def send_email(request):
subject = request.POST.get("subject", "")
message = request.POST.get("message", "")
from_email = request.POST.get("from_email", "")
if subject and message and from_email:
try:
send_mail(subject, message, from_email, ["admin@example.com"])
except ValueError:
return HttpResponse("Invalid header found.")
return HttpResponseRedirect("/contact/thanks/")
else:
# In reality we'd use a form class
# to get proper validation errors.
return HttpResponse("Make sure all fields are entered and valid.")
Older versions raised django.core.mail.BadHeaderError for some
invalid headers. This has been replaced with ValueError.
Establishing and closing an SMTP connection (or any other network connection, for that matter) is an expensive process. If you have a lot of emails to send, it makes sense to reuse an SMTP connection, rather than creating and destroying a connection every time you want to send an email.
There are two ways to tell an email backend to reuse a connection. Both
require an email backend instance obtained via get_connection(), which is
documented in Email backends.
The first approach is to obtain an email backend instance from
get_connection() and use its send_messages() method. This takes a
list of EmailMessage (or subclass) instances, and sends them all using
that single connection. As a consequence, any connection set on an individual message is ignored.
For example, if you have a function called get_notification_emails() that
returns a list of EmailMessage objects representing some periodic
email you wish to send out, you could send these emails using a single call to
send_messages():
from django.core import mail
connection = mail.get_connection() # Use default email connection
messages = get_notification_emails()
connection.send_messages(messages)
In this example, the call to send_messages() opens a connection on the
backend, sends the list of messages, and then closes the connection again.
The second approach is to use the open() and close() methods on the
email backend to manually control the connection. send_messages() will not
open or close the connection if it is already open, so if you
manually open the connection, you can control when it is closed. For example:
from django.core import mail
connection = mail.get_connection()
# Manually open the connection.
connection.open()
# Construct an email message that will use the connection.
email1 = mail.EmailMessage(
"Hello",
"Body goes here",
"from@example.com",
["to1@example.com"],
connection=connection,
)
# Send the email through its connection. The connection was already open,
# so send() leaves it open after sending.
email1.send()
# Construct two more email messages. (Passing None as the third argument
# uses settings.DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL as the "From:" address.)
email2 = mail.EmailMessage("Hi", "Message", None, ["to2@example.com"])
email3 = mail.EmailMessage("Hi", "Message", None, ["to3@example.com"])
# Send the two messages. The connection is still open.
connection.send_messages([email2, email3])
# Because we opened it, we need to manually close the connection.
connection.close()
When you manually open a backend’s connection, you are responsible for ensuring
it gets closed. The example above actually has a bug: if an exception occurs
while sending the messages, the connection will not be closed. This can be
fixed with a try-finally statement, but using the backend instance as a
context manager is preferable, as it automatically calls open() and
close() as needed.
This is equivalent to the previous example, but uses the backend as a context manager to avoid leaving the connection open on errors:
from django.core import mail
with mail.get_connection() as connection:
# The backend connection is automatically opened inside the context.
email1 = mail.EmailMessage(
"Hello",
"Body goes here",
"from@example.com",
["to1@example.com"],
connection=connection,
)
email1.send()
# The connection is still open, and is reused for the second send.
email2 = mail.EmailMessage("Hi", "Message", None, ["to2@example.com"])
email3 = mail.EmailMessage("Hi", "Message", None, ["to3@example.com"])
connection.send_messages([email2, email3])
# After exiting the context (either normally or because of an error),
# the backend connection is automatically closed.
The actual sending of an email is handled by the email backend.
Django comes with several email backends. With the exception of the SMTP backend, these are mainly useful during testing and development. If the built-in backends don’t meet your needs there are third-party packages available. You can also subclass one of the built-in backends to change its behavior, or even write your own email backend.
The email backend class has the following methods:
open() instantiates a long-lived email-sending connection.
close() closes the current email-sending connection.
send_messages(email_messages) sends a list of EmailMessage
objects. If the connection is not open, this call will implicitly open the
connection, and close the connection afterward. If the connection is already
open, it will be left open after mail has been sent.
It can also be used as a context manager, which will automatically call
open() and close() as needed. An example is in
Sending many messages efficiently.
This is the default backend. Email will be sent through a SMTP server.
The value for each argument is retrieved from the matching setting if the
argument is None:
host: EMAIL_HOST
port: EMAIL_PORT
username: EMAIL_HOST_USER
password: EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD
use_tls: EMAIL_USE_TLS
use_ssl: EMAIL_USE_SSL
timeout: EMAIL_TIMEOUT
ssl_keyfile: EMAIL_SSL_KEYFILE
ssl_certfile: EMAIL_SSL_CERTFILE
The SMTP backend is the default configuration inherited by Django. If you want to specify it explicitly, put the following in your settings:
EMAIL_BACKEND = "django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend"
If unspecified, the default timeout will be the one provided by
socket.getdefaulttimeout(), which defaults to None (no timeout).
Instead of sending out real emails the console backend just writes the
emails that would be sent to the standard output. By default, the console
backend writes to stdout. You can use a different stream-like object by
providing the stream keyword argument when constructing the connection.
To specify this backend, put the following in your settings:
EMAIL_BACKEND = "django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend"
This backend is not intended for use in production – it is provided as a convenience that can be used during development.
The file backend writes emails to a file. A new file is created for each new
session that is opened on this backend. The directory to which the files are
written is either taken from the EMAIL_FILE_PATH setting or from the
file_path keyword when creating a connection with get_connection().
To specify this backend, put the following in your settings:
EMAIL_BACKEND = "django.core.mail.backends.filebased.EmailBackend"
EMAIL_FILE_PATH = "/tmp/app-messages" # change this to a proper location
This backend is not intended for use in production – it is provided as a convenience that can be used during development.
The 'locmem' backend stores messages in a special attribute of the
django.core.mail module. The outbox attribute is created when the first
message is sent. It’s a list with an EmailMessage instance for each
message that would be sent.
To specify this backend, put the following in your settings:
EMAIL_BACKEND = "django.core.mail.backends.locmem.EmailBackend"
This backend is not intended for use in production – it is provided as a convenience that can be used during development and testing.
Django’s test runner automatically uses this backend for testing.
As the name suggests the dummy backend does nothing with your messages. To specify this backend, put the following in your settings:
EMAIL_BACKEND = "django.core.mail.backends.dummy.EmailBackend"
This backend is not intended for use in production – it is provided as a convenience that can be used during development.
There are community-maintained solutions!
Django has a vibrant ecosystem. There are email backends highlighted on the Community Ecosystem page. The Django Packages Email grid has even more options for you!
Third-party email backends are available that:
Integrate directly with commercial email service providers’ APIs (which often have extra functionality not available through SMTP).
Offload email sending to asynchronous task queues.
Add features to other email backends, such as enforcing do-not-send lists or logging sent messages.
Provide development and debugging tools, such as sandbox capture and in-browser email previews.
If you need to change how emails are sent you can write your own email
backend. The EMAIL_BACKEND setting in your settings file is then
the Python import path for your backend class.
Custom email backends should subclass BaseEmailBackend that is located in
the django.core.mail.backends.base module. A custom email backend must
implement the send_messages(email_messages) method. This method receives a
list of EmailMessage instances and returns the number of successfully
delivered messages. If your backend has any concept of a persistent session or
connection, you should also implement the open() and close() methods.
Refer to smtp.EmailBackend for a reference implementation.
The get_connection() function in django.core.mail returns an
instance of the email backend that you can use.
By default, a call to get_connection() will return an instance of the
email backend specified in EMAIL_BACKEND. If you specify the
backend argument, an instance of that backend will be instantiated.
The keyword-only fail_silently argument controls how the backend should
handle errors. If fail_silently is True, exceptions during the email
sending process will be silently ignored.
All other keyword arguments are passed directly to the constructor of the email backend.
Deprecated since version 6.0: Passing fail_silently as positional argument is deprecated.
There are times when you do not want Django to send emails at all. For example, while developing a website, you probably don’t want to send out thousands of emails – but you may want to validate that emails will be sent to the right people under the right conditions, and that those emails will contain the correct content.
The easiest way to configure email for local development is to use the
console email backend. This backend
redirects all email to stdout, allowing you to inspect the content of mail.
The file email backend can also be useful during development – this backend dumps the contents of every SMTP connection to a file that can be inspected at your leisure.
Another approach is to use a mocked SMTP server that receives the emails locally and displays them to the terminal, but does not actually send anything. The aiosmtpd package provides a way to accomplish this:
python -m pip install "aiosmtpd >= 1.4.5"
python -m aiosmtpd -n -l localhost:8025
This command will start a minimal SMTP server listening on port 8025 of
localhost. This server prints to standard output all email headers and the
email body. You then only need to set the EMAIL_HOST and
EMAIL_PORT accordingly. For a more detailed discussion of SMTP
server options, see the documentation of the aiosmtpd module.
For information about unit-testing the sending of emails in your application, see the Email services section of the testing documentation.
Apr 17, 2026