Anymail: Django email integration for transactional ESPs

Anymail integrates several transactional email service providers (ESPs) into Django, with a consistent API that lets you use ESP-added features without locking your code to a particular ESP.

It currently fully supports Amazon SES, Mailgun, Mailjet, Postmark, SendinBlue, SendGrid, and SparkPost, and has limited support for Mandrill.

Anymail normalizes ESP functionality so it "just works" with Django's built-in django.core.mail package. It includes:

• Support for HTML, attachments, extra headers, and other features of Django's built-in email
• Extensions that make it easy to use extra ESP functionality, like tags, metadata, and tracking, with code that's portable between ESPs
• Simplified inline images for HTML email
• Normalized sent-message status and tracking notification, by connecting your ESP's webhooks to Django signals
• "Batch transactional" sends using your ESP's merge and template features
• Inbound message support, to receive email through your ESP's webhooks, with simplified, portable access to attachments and other inbound content

Anymail maintains compatibility with all Django versions that are in mainstream or extended support, plus (usually) a few older Django versions, and is extensively tested on all Python versions supported by Django. (Even-older Django versions may still be covered by an Anymail extended support release; consult the changelog for details.)

Anymail releases follow semantic versioning. The package is released under the BSD license.

Resources

• Full documentation: https://anymail.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
• Package on PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/django-anymail/
• Project on Github: https://github.com/anymail/django-anymail
• Changelog: https://anymail.readthedocs.io/en/stable/changelog/

Anymail 1-2-3

Here's how to send a message. This example uses Mailgun, but you can substitute Mailjet or Postmark or SendGrid or SparkPost or any other supported ESP where you see "mailgun":

1. Install Anymail from PyPI:

   $ pip install "django-anymail[mailgun]"

   (The [mailgun] part installs any additional packages needed for that ESP. Mailgun doesn't have any, but some other ESPs do.)

2. Edit your project's settings.py:

   INSTALLED_APPS = [
       # ...
       "anymail",
       # ...
   ]
   
   ANYMAIL = {
       # (exact settings here depend on your ESP...)
       "MAILGUN_API_KEY": "<your Mailgun key>",
       "MAILGUN_SENDER_DOMAIN": 'mg.example.com',  # your Mailgun domain, if needed
   }
   EMAIL_BACKEND = "anymail.backends.mailgun.EmailBackend"  # or sendgrid.EmailBackend, or...
   DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = "[email protected]"  # if you don't already have this in settings
   SERVER_EMAIL = "[email protected]"  # ditto (default from-email for Django errors)

3. Now the regular Django email functions will send through your chosen ESP:

   from django.core.mail import send_mail
   
   send_mail("It works!", "This will get sent through Mailgun",
             "Anymail Sender <[email protected]>", ["[email protected]"])

   You could send an HTML message, complete with an inline image, custom tags and metadata:

   from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
   from anymail.message import attach_inline_image_file
   
   msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(
       subject="Please activate your account",
       body="Click to activate your account: https://example.com/activate",
       from_email="Example <[email protected]>",
       to=["New User <[email protected]>", "[email protected]"],
       reply_to=["Helpdesk <[email protected]>"])
   
   # Include an inline image in the html:
   logo_cid = attach_inline_image_file(msg, "/path/to/logo.jpg")
   html = """<img alt="Logo" src="cid:{logo_cid}">
             <p>Please <a href="https://example.com/activate">activate</a>
             your account</p>""".format(logo_cid=logo_cid)
   msg.attach_alternative(html, "text/html")
   
   # Optional Anymail extensions:
   msg.metadata = {"user_id": "8675309", "experiment_variation": 1}
   msg.tags = ["activation", "onboarding"]
   msg.track_clicks = True
   
   # Send it:
   msg.send()

See the full documentation for more features and options, including receiving messages and tracking sent message status.