Sending Emails to the Outside World

Thanks for another good course Darren. I had issues before coming across this lecture and learning that accounts is a preserved Django authentication path. I have a few questions. I’m trying to confirm the properties of User fields in the django.contrib.auth.models User. /admin and the python shell give me the values easily enough from which I’m inferring that username is required and probably unique. And email, which we added, and other names aren’t required. Is this correct? And about the previous chapter of testing email reset. I tried running (venv) $ python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025 from my venv after changing the settings file EMAIL_BACKEND = ‘django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend’ But no luck with any output to the screen. I’m just wondering if this is something others have found.

Did you miss a step with the mailgun set up Darren? I had to register my email for receiving the reset. Maybe I overlooked that in your video. My question is what happens in production? Do I still need a 3rd party redirect service?

@brianashley - On the mailgun setup, I didn’t have to register my email other than in the regular way to set the account up, but it may vary depending on the email used with mailgun, and it’s possible that their setup has changed since the course was made - on logging in now I have to confirm a code which was sent to the email which I didn’t have to do previously.

On the other comment, if I’m reading that right, I’d say you are correct - username is generally unique (although there are some exceptions depending on the user model and authentication that you have set up), and the email field will be required (for obvious reasons!) - the others will be down to app preferences but shouldn’t alter the functionality.

On the email setup front, I would check that the other email settings in settings.py are what you need for the local SMTP Daemon to work with, if you’re seeing nothing from it.

Hi there,

Whilst sending the password reset I keep getting:

SMTPRecipientsRefused (550, b‘5.7.1 Relaying denied’)}

I tried adding different users with various emails I have.

I can’t seem to get past this message…

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi,

I just wanted to say that I’m loving the course so far, but I hit a snag with Mailgun. It looks like I set up a Mailgun account a long time ago with some other course so they disabled my free account. When I reached out to them to get the account re-enabled they refused to re-enable the account without one verified domain. I don’t have my own domain so I won’t be able to use Mailgun. I’ll skip this section and continue on with the next.

Thank you! Nancy

You can use sendgrid as an option. You need to create an account, get the API key, the HOST_USER is ‘apikey’. Documentation that might be helpful, docs.sendgrid.com/for-developers/sending-email/django.

project/settings.py

LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = 'dashboard'

LOGOUT_REDIRECT_URL = 'dashboard'
SENDGRID_API_KEY = os.environ.get('SENDGRID_API_KEY')
# EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_BACKEND = "django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend"


EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.sendgrid.net'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'apikey'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = SENDGRID_API_KEY
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True

A helpful and completely free service for testing emails is available at ethereal.email as well. Rather than sending out emails the service collects them in a message inbox for you to look at. Emails can be viewed as plain text or HTML, which is convenient if you are sending emails with both plain text and HTML content.