Testing email sending in Django [closed]

Answer 1

You can use a file backend for sending emails which is a very handy solution for development and testing; emails are not sent but stored in a folder you can specify!

Answer 2

Django test framework has some built in helpers to aid you with testing e-mail service.

Example from docs (short version):

from django.core import mail
from django.test import TestCase

class EmailTest(TestCase):
    def test_send_email(self):
        mail.send_mail('Subject here', 'Here is the message.',
            'from@example.com', ['to@example.com'],
            fail_silently=False)
        self.assertEqual(len(mail.outbox), 1)
        self.assertEqual(mail.outbox[0].subject, 'Subject here')

Answer 3

For any project that doesn't require sending attachments, I use django-mailer, which has the benefit of all outbound emails ending up in a queue until I trigger their sending, and even after they've been sent, they are then logged - all of which is visible in the Admin, making it easy to quickly check what you emailing code is trying to fire off into the intertubes.

Answer 4

Tying a few of the pieces here together, here's a straightforward setup based on filebased.EmailBackend. This renders a list view linking to the individual log files, which have conveniently timestamped filenames. Clicking a link in the list displays that message in the browser (raw):

Settings

EMAIL_BACKEND = "django.core.mail.backends.filebased.EmailBackend"
EMAIL_FILE_PATH = f"{MEDIA_ROOT}/email_out"

View

import os

from django.conf import settings
from django.shortcuts import render

def mailcheck(request):

    path = f"{settings.MEDIA_ROOT}/email_out"
    mail_list = os.listdir(path)

    return render(request, "mailcheck.html", context={"mail_list": mail_list})

Template

{% if mail_list %}
  <ul>
  {% for msg in mail_list %}
    <li>
      <a href="{{ MEDIA_URL }}email_out/{{msg}}">{{ msg }}</a>
    </li>
  {% endfor %}
  </ul>
{% else %}
  No messages found.
{% endif %}

urls

path("mailcheck/", view=mailcheck, name="mailcheck"),

Answer 5

Use MailHog

Inspired by MailCatcher, easier to install.

Built with Go - MailHog runs without installation on multiple platforms.

Also, it has a component called Jim, the MailHog Chaos Monkey, which enables you to test sending emails with various problems happening:

What can Jim do?

• Reject connections
• Rate limit connections
• Reject authentication
• Reject senders
• Reject recipients

Read more about it here.

(Unlike original mailcatcher, which failed on me when sending emails with emoji, encoded in UTF-8 and it WASN'T really fixed in the current release, MailHog just works.)

Answer 6

Patching SMTPLib for testing purposes can help test sending mails without sending them.

• http://www.psychicorigami.com/2007/09/20/monkey-patching-pythons-smtp-lib-for-unit-testing/