Testing email sending in Django [closed]

Answer 1

Django also has an in-memory email backend. More details in the docs under In-memory backend. This is present in Django 1.6 not sure if it's present in anything earlier.

Answer 2

Why not start your own really simple SMTP Server by inherit from smtpd.SMTPServer and threading.Thread:

class TestingSMTPServer(smtpd.SMTPServer, threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self, port=25):
        smtpd.SMTPServer.__init__(
            self,
            ('localhost', port),
            ('localhost', port),
            decode_data=False
        )
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)

    def process_message(self, peer, mailfrom, rcpttos, data, **kwargs):
        self.received_peer = peer
        self.received_mailfrom = mailfrom
        self.received_rcpttos = rcpttos
        self.received_data = data

    def run(self):
        asyncore.loop()

process_message is called whenever your SMTP Server receive a mail request, you can do whatever you want there.

In the testing code, do something like this:

smtp_server = TestingSMTPServer()
smtp_server.start()
do_thing_that_would_send_a_mail()
smtp_server.close()
self.assertIn(b'hello', smtp_server.received_data)

Just remember to close() the asyncore.dispatcher by calling smtp_server.close() to end the asyncore loop(stop the server from listening).

Answer 3

If you are into unit-testing the best solution is to use the In-memory backend provided by django.

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.locmem.EmailBackend'

Take the case of use it as a py.test fixture

@pytest.fixture(autouse=True)
def email_backend_setup(self, settings):
    settings.EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.locmem.EmailBackend'  

In each test, the mail.outbox is reset with the server, so there are no side effects between tests.

from django.core import mail

def test_send(self):
    mail.send_mail('subject', 'body.', 'from@example.com', ['to@example.com'])
    assert len(mail.outbox) == 1

def test_send_again(self):
    mail.send_mail('subject', 'body.', 'from@example.com', ['to@example.com'])
    assert len(mail.outbox) == 1

Answer 4

If you have a TomCat server available, or other servlet engine, then a nice approach is "Post Hoc" which is a small server that looks to the application exactly like a SMTP server, but it includes a user interface that allows you to view and inspect the email messages that were sent. It is open source and freely available.

Find it at: Post Hoc GitHub Site

See the blog post: PostHoc: Testing Apps that Send Email