| Info: | A Django email backend for Amazon's Simple Email Service |
|---|---|
| Author: | Harry Marr (http://github.com/hmarr, http://twitter.com/harrymarr) |
| Collaborators: | Paul Craciunoiu (http://github.com/pcraciunoiu, http://twitter.com/embrangler) |
Django-SES is a drop-in mail backend for Django. Instead of sending emails through a traditional SMTP mail server, Django-SES routes email through Amazon Web Services' excellent Simple Email Service (SES).
Amazon SES allows you to also setup usernames and passwords. If you do configure things that way, you do not need this package. The Django default email backend is capable of authenticating with Amazon SES and correctly sending email.
Using django-ses gives you additional features like deliverability reports that can be hard and/or cumbersome to obtain when using the SMTP interface.
Note: In order to use smtp with Amazon SES, you may have to install some supporting packages for ssl. Check out this SMTP SSL email backend for Django
Configuring, maintaining, and dealing with some complicated edge cases can be time-consuming. Sending emails with Django-SES might be attractive to you if:
- You don't want to maintain mail servers.
- You are already deployed on EC2 (In-bound traffic to SES is free from EC2 instances).
- You need to send a high volume of email.
- You don't want to have to worry about PTR records, Reverse DNS, email whitelist/blacklist services.
- You want to improve delivery rate and inbox cosmetics by DKIM signing your messages using SES's Easy DKIM feature.
- Django-SES is a truely drop-in replacement for the default mail backend. Your code should require no changes.
Assuming you've got Django installed, you'll need Boto 2.1.0 or higher. Boto is a Python library that wraps the AWS API.
You can do the following to install boto 2.1.0 (we're using --upgrade here to make sure you get 2.1.0):
pip install --upgrade boto
Install django-ses:
pip install django-ses
Add the following to your settings.py:
EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django_ses.SESBackend' # These are optional -- if they're set as environment variables they won't # need to be set here as well AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = 'YOUR-ACCESS-KEY-ID' AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = 'YOUR-SECRET-ACCESS-KEY' # Additionally, if you are not using the default AWS region of us-east-1, # you need to specify a region, like so: AWS_SES_REGION_NAME = 'us-west-2' AWS_SES_REGION_ENDPOINT = 'email.us-west-2.amazonaws.com'
Alternatively, instead of AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, you can include the following two settings values. This is useful in situations where you would like to use a separate access key to send emails via SES than you would to upload files via S3:
AWS_SES_ACCESS_KEY_ID = 'YOUR-ACCESS-KEY-ID' AWS_SES_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = 'YOUR-SECRET-ACCESS-KEY'
Now, when you use django.core.mail.send_mail, Simple Email Service will
send the messages by default.
Since SES imposes a rate limit and will reject emails after the limit has been reached, django-ses will attempt to conform to the rate limit by querying the API for your current limit and then sending no more than that number of messages in a two-second period (which is half of the rate limit, just to be sure to stay clear of the limit). This is controlled by the following setting:
AWS_SES_AUTO_THROTTLE = 0.5 # (default; safety factor applied to rate limit)
To turn off automatic throttling, set this to None.
Check out the example directory for more information.
To set this up, install django-ses with the bounce extra:
pip install django-ses[bounce]
Then add a bounce url handler in your urls.py:
from django_ses.views import handle_bounce
from django.views.decorators.csrf import csrf_exempt
urlpatterns = [ ...
url(r'^ses/bounce/$', csrf_exempt(handle_bounce)),
...
]
Amazon SNS has three signals for each status (bounce, complaint, delivery).
- Add an SNS topic.
2. In SES setup an SNS destination in "Configuration Sets". Use this
configuration set by setting AWS_SES_CONFIGURATION_SET. Set the topic
to what you created in 1.
3. Add an https subscriber to the topic. (eg. https://www.yourdomain.com/ses/bounce/) Do not check "Enable raw message delivery".
Using signal 'bounce_received' for manager bounce email. For example:
from django_ses.signals import bounce_received
from django.dispatch import receiver
@receiver(bounce_received)
def bounce_handler(sender, *args, **kwargs):
print("This is bounce email object")
print(kwargs.get('mail_obj'))
Using signal 'complaint_received' for manager complaint email. For example:
from django_ses.signals import complaint_received
from django.dispatch import receiver
@receiver(complaint_received)
def complaint_handler(sender, *args, **kwargs):
print("This is complaint email object")
print(kwargs.get('mail_obj'))
Using signal 'delivery_received' for manager delivery email. For example:
from django_ses.signals import delivery_received
from django.dispatch import receiver
@receiver(delivery_received)
def delivery_handler(sender, *args, **kwargs):
print("This is delivery email object")
print(kwargs.get('mail_obj'))
You can track your SES email sending at a granular level using SES Event Publishing. To do this, you set up an SES Configuration Set and add event handlers to it to send your events on to a destination within AWS (SNS, Cloudwatch or Kinesis Firehose) for further processing and analysis.
To ensure that emails you send via django-ses will be tagged with your SES Configuration Set, set the AWS_SES_CONFIGURATION_SET setting in your settings.py to the name of the configuration set:
AWS_SES_CONFIGURATION_SET = 'my-configuration-set-name'
This will add the X-SES-CONFIGURATION-SET header to all your outgoing e-mails.
If you want to set the SES Configuration Set on a per message basis, set AWS_SES_CONFIGURATION_SET to a callable. The callable should conform to the following prototype:
def ses_configuration_set(message, dkim_domain=None, dkim_key=None,
dkim_selector=None, dkim_headers=()):
configuration_set = 'my-default-set'
# use message and dkim_* to modify configuration_set
return configuration_set
AWS_SES_CONFIGURATION_SET = ses_configuration_set
where
- message is a django.core.mail.EmailMessage object (or subclass)
- dkim_domain is a string containing the DKIM domain for this message
- dkim_key is a string containing the DKIM private key for this message
- dkim_selector is a string containing the DKIM selector (see DKIM, below for explanation)
- dkim_headers is a list of strings containing the names of the headers to be DKIM signed (see DKIM, below for explanation)
Using DomainKeys is entirely optional, however it is recommended by Amazon for authenticating your email address and improving delivery success rate. See http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/DKIM.html. Besides authentication, you might also want to consider using DKIM in order to remove the via email-bounces.amazonses.com message shown to gmail users - see http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1311182.
Currently there are two methods to use DKIM with Django-SES: traditional Manual Signing and the more recently introduced Amazon Easy DKIM feature.
Easy DKIM is a feature of Amazon SES that automatically signs every message that you send from a verified email address or domain with a DKIM signature.
You can enable Easy DKIM in the AWS Management Console for SES. There you can also add the required domain verification and DKIM records to Route 53 (or copy them to your alternate DNS).
Once enabled and verified Easy DKIM needs no additional dependencies or DKIM specific settings to work with Django-SES.
For more information and a setup guide see: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/easy-dkim.html
To enable Manual DKIM Signing you should install the pydkim package and specify values
for the DKIM_PRIVATE_KEY and DKIM_DOMAIN settings. You can generate a
private key with a command such as openssl genrsa 512 and get the public key
portion with openssl rsa -pubout <private.key. The public key should be
published to ses._domainkey.example.com if your domain is example.com. You
can use a different name instead of ses by changing the DKIM_SELECTOR
setting.
The SES relay will modify email headers such as Date and Message-Id so by
default only the From, To, Cc, Subject headers are signed, not the full
set of headers. This is sufficient for most DKIM validators but can be overridden
with the DKIM_HEADERS setting.
Example settings.py:
DKIM_DOMAIN = 'example.com' DKIM_PRIVATE_KEY = ''' -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- xxxxxxxxxxx -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY----- '''
Example DNS record published to Route53 with boto:
route53 add_record ZONEID ses._domainkey.example.com. TXT '"v=DKIM1; p=xxx"' 86400
Django SES comes with two ways of viewing sending statistics.
The first one is a simple read-only report on your 24 hour sending quota, verified email addresses and bi-weekly sending statistics.
To generate and view SES sending statistics reports, include, update
INSTALLED_APPS:
INSTALLED_APPS = (
# ...
'django.contrib.admin',
'django_ses',
# ...
)
... and urls.py:
urlpatterns += (url(r'^admin/django-ses/', include('django_ses.urls')),)
Optional enhancements to stats:
You can use adminplus for this (https://github.com/jsocol/django-adminplus):
from django_ses.views import dashboard
admin.site.register_view('django-ses', dashboard, 'Django SES Stats')
If you need to keep send statistics around for longer than two weeks, django-ses also comes with a model that lets you store these. To use this feature you'll need to run:
python manage.py migrate
To collect the statistics, run the get_ses_statistics management command
(refer to next section for details). After running this command the statistics
will be viewable via /admin/django_ses/.
To use these you must include django_ses in your INSTALLED_APPS.
Manage verified email addresses through the management command.
python manage.py ses_email_address -l
To collect and store SES sending statistics in the database, run:
python manage.py get_ses_statistics
Sending statistics are aggregated daily (UTC time). Stats for the latest day
(when you run the command) may be inaccurate if run before end of day (UTC).
If you want to keep your statistics up to date, setup cron to run this
command a short time after midnight (UTC) daily.
If you'd like Django's Builtin Email Error Reporting to function properly
(actually send working emails), you'll have to explicitly set the
SERVER_EMAIL setting to one of your SES-verified addresses. Otherwise, your
error emails will all fail and you'll be blissfully unaware of a problem.
Note: You will need to sign up for SES and verify any emails you're going to use in the from_email argument to django.core.mail.send_email(). Boto has a verify_email_address() method: https://github.com/boto/boto/blob/master/boto/ses/connection.py
django-ses requires boto version 2.1.0 or later.
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID,AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY- Required. Your API keys for Amazon SES.
AWS_SES_ACCESS_KEY_ID,AWS_SES_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY- Required. Alternative API keys for Amazon SES. This is useful in situations where you would like to use separate access keys for different AWS services.
AWS_SES_REGION_NAME,AWS_SES_REGION_ENDPOINT- Optionally specify what region your SES service is using. Note that this is required if your SES service is not using us-east-1, as omitting these settings implies this region. Details: http://readthedocs.org/docs/boto/en/latest/ref/ses.html#boto.ses.regions http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html
AWS_SES_RETURN_PATH- Instruct Amazon SES to forward bounced emails and complaints to this email. For more information please refer to http://aws.amazon.com/ses/faqs/#38
AWS_SES_CONFIGURATION_SET- Optional. Use this to mark your e-mails as from being from a particular SES Configuration Set. Set this to a string if you want all messages to have the same configuration set. Set this to a callable if you want to set configuration set on a per message basis.
AWS_SES_PROXY- Optional. Use this address as a proxy while connecting to Amazon SES.
AWS_SES_PROXY_PORT- Optional. Use this port for proxy connections while connecting to Amazon SES.
AWS_SES_PROXY_USER- Optional. Use this user when setting up proxy connections while connecting to Amazon SES.
AWS_SES_PROXY_PASS- Optional. Use this password when setting up proxy connections while connecting to Amazon SES.
TIME_ZONE- Default Django setting, optionally set this. Details: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/#time-zone
DKIM_DOMAIN,DKIM_PRIVATE_KEY- Optional. If these settings are defined and the pydkim module is installed
then email messages will be signed with the specified key. You will also
need to publish your public key on DNS; the selector is set to
sesby default. See http://dkim.org/ for further detail.
If you'd like to fix a bug, add a feature, etc
- Start by opening an issue.
- Be explicit so that project collaborators can understand and reproduce the issue, or decide whether the feature falls within the project's goals. Code examples can be useful, too.
- File a pull request.
- You may write a prototype or suggested fix.
- Check your code for errors, complaints.
- Use check.py
- Write and run tests.
- Write your own test showing the issue has been resolved, or the feature works as intended.
To run the tests:
python manage.py test django_ses
To create a release:
virtualenv -p python3 ~/.virtualenvs/django-ses workon django-ses pip3 install twine python3 setup.py sdist python3 setup.py bdist_wheel --universal twine upload dist/*