Efficiently Test Emails in Django

Sunday, July 19 2009 6:08 p.m.

Testing emails can be an inefficient process. The email needs to leave your machine, arrive at the SMTP server, get forwarded to your test mail server and then downloaded by your email client. Do you want those 30 seconds of your life back?

Using an SMTP sink, you can receive the email to your screen instantly. Setup is easy.

•  ♦  Download smtp_sink.py
•  ♦  Put it in whatever your project directory is. You will want to create a "inbox" directory. Besides outputting to the screen, this will automatically copy the email to the inbox directory in case you need to reference it later
•  ♦  Change your settings.py to have: EMAIL_HOST = '127.0.0.1', EMAIL_HOST_USER = '', EMAIL_PORT = 25

If you have a script that loads your sandbox environment automatically, you will want to load smtp_sink.py automatically. It will send a test signal to see if it's already running and not start twice.

If you run automated test scripts, the output of the "inbox" can be tested.