When developing applications in Django, it may be nice to print emails instead of sending them. If you send them you have to be careful which addresses you use. Just being on the safe side and always using @example.{com,org,net} is not enough, you have to use an address you can actually retrieve emails for. And you have to configure your development environment to actually deliver mails. And then wait for the whole thing in each code-try iteration.
So, basing myself on the testing code, I’ve added this to settings.py and mails are now printed:
if DEBUG: from utils import BogusSMTPConnection from django.core import mail mail.SMTPConnection = BogusSMTPConnection
Of course you’ll also need the BogusSMTPConnection class, I’ve defined it as following:
from textwrap import wrap
class BogusSMTPConnection(object):
"""Instead of sending emails, print them to the console."""
def __init__(*args, **kwargs):
print("Initialized bogus SMTP connection")
def open(self):
print("Open bogus SMTP connection")
def close(self):
print("Close bogus SMTP connection")
def send_messages(self, messages):
print("Sending through bogus SMTP connection:")
for message in messages:
print("tFrom: %s" % message.from_email)
print("tTo: %s" % ", ".join(message.to))
print("tSubject: %s" % message.subject)
print("t%s" % "nt".join(wrap(message.body)))
print(messages)
return len(messages)
And that’s it.
This was really helpful, thanks. I was dreading the thought of setting up an SMTP server just to send emails I didn’t care about.
Just a nit, but I assume in the close method above you meant to print(“Close….) not clone.
Thanks Peter, fixed!
Have you tried this:
python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025
This will catch everything and redirect the input into standard out, which you can redirect if you want of course.
Can’t claim credit, my fellow worker showed me. :)
FYI in Django 1.2 mail.SMTPConnection is deprecated, and this little trick no longer works. I don’t have a replacement solution yet, but I’ll post it here if I find one.
Ok, so this got much easier as of Django 1.2. Instead of writing your own class, just throw this in your settings.py:
if DEBUG:EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'
See the rest of the options here.