flask-mail gmail: connection refused

Question

I'm getting the following error when I attempt to use flask-mail to send an email through my gmail account.

error: [Errno 10061] No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it

I've tried configuring flask-mail in various ways, but so far I always get this error.

Here are some sample configurations I've tried:

1. app = Flask(__name__)
   mail = Mail(app)
   
   app.config.update(dict(
       DEBUG = True,
       MAIL_SERVER = 'smtp.gmail.com',
       MAIL_PORT = 465,
       MAIL_USE_TLS = False,
       MAIL_USE_SSL = True,
       MAIL_USERNAME = 'my_username@gmail.com',
       MAIL_PASSWORD = 'my_password',
   ))
   

2. app = Flask(__name__)
   mail = Mail(app)
   
   app.config.update(dict(
       DEBUG = True,
       MAIL_SERVER = 'smtp.gmail.com',
       MAIL_PORT = 587,
       MAIL_USE_TLS = True,
       MAIL_USE_SSL = False,
       MAIL_USERNAME = 'my_username@gmail.com',
       MAIL_PASSWORD = 'my_password',
   ))
   

3. This configuration is from the flask mega-tutorial (http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial-part-xi-email-support)

   app = Flask(__name__)
   mail = Mail(app)
   
   app.config.update(dict(
       DEBUG = True,
       # email server
       MAIL_SERVER = 'smtp.googlemail.com',
       MAIL_PORT = 465,
       MAIL_USE_TLS = False,
       MAIL_USE_SSL = True,
       MAIL_USERNAME = 'my_username',
       MAIL_PASSWORD = 'my_password',
   
       # administrator list
       ADMINS = ['my_username@gmail.com']
   ))
   

Has anyone else experienced a similar problem?

Answer 1

As far as I can tell there is nothing wrong with this configuration. The only problem is that your application is not using it. You should update configuration before you initialize Mail:

app = Flask(__name__)

app.config.update(dict(
    DEBUG = True,
    MAIL_SERVER = 'smtp.gmail.com',
    MAIL_PORT = 587,
    MAIL_USE_TLS = True,
    MAIL_USE_SSL = False,
    MAIL_USERNAME = 'my_username@gmail.com',
    MAIL_PASSWORD = 'my_password',
))

mail = Mail(app)

Answer 2

In addition to zero323's answer, adding the configuration before creating a Mail object should help, but if it gives an SMTPAuthentication error with a gmail server, then just for testing purpose one may allow less secure apps to login for a while - https://myaccount.google.com/security#signin