Setup Sending Email in Django Project

Haven’t you observed, when you register on some websites, you get mail from that company or institution? The email would be, a verification email or welcome email, account creation successful email or thanks-regard email, etc. For example, when you create a Google account, the first mail you get would be something like, “Hi Xyz, Welcome to Google. Your new account comes with access to Google products, apps, and services…..” Sending these types of emails from your Django application is quite easy. Although you can refer to the documentation to knowing more about sending emails in Django, this is remarkably condensed and made easier. 

How to send simple emails to the registered users of your Django application Illustration of Django emails using an example. Consider a project named geeksforgeeks having an app named geeks. Refer this to create a Django projects and apps. Now let’s demonstrate this in geeksforgeeks project. In your “geeks” app’s settings.py file, enter the following, 

Python3

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.gmail.com'
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_HOST_USER = #sender's email-id
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = #password associated with above email-id

In the above code, EMAIL_HOST_USER = ‘xabc6457@gmail.com’ and EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = ‘xyz123abc@’ are the lines where you need to add the sender’s mail id and password. xabc6457@gmail.com and xyz123abc@ are just examples. Now to use this in our application, move to views.py and add these lines at the top section as below.

Python3

from django.conf import settings
from django.core.mail import send_mail

Generally, emails are sent to the users who signup right? So, in the signup view function, add these lines. 

Python3

subject = 'welcome to GFG world'
message = f'Hi {user.username}, thank you for registering in geeksforgeeks.'
email_from = settings.EMAIL_HOST_USER
recipient_list = [user.email, ]
send_mail( subject, message, email_from, recipient_list )

Now we will understand what exactly is happening. Here,

• subject refers to the email subject.
• message refers to the email message, the body of the email.
• email_from refers to the sender’s details.This takes the EMAIL_HOST_USER from settings.py file, where you added those lines of code earlier.
• recipient_list is the list of recipients to whom the mail has to be sent that is, whoever registers to your application they receive the email.
• send_mail is an inbuilt Django function that takes subject, message, email_from, and recipient’s list as arguments, this is responsible to send emails.

After these extra lines of code has been added to your project, you can send emails now. But if you are using Gmail, then the first time you make these changes in your project and run, you might get SMTP error. To correct that- 1-Go to the Google account registered with the sender’s mail address and select Manage your account

2-Go to security section at the left nav and scroll down. Look for ‘App password’.

3- Inside App password select the any of the option from dropdown and given name as per your wish.

4- Now you will see a code on your screen, copy the code.

5. Paste the code in settings.py where you have declared EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD. 

6. Finally run the application. Now, register any user to your application, and they will receive mail from the email account you had mentioned. run the application.