(c) 2019 Jeff Vandrew Jr
Flask-EZMail is easier email for Flask.
Flask-EZMail is a fork of Flask-Mail. it maintains high compatibility with Flask-Mail, such that very little code refactoring is needed to switch from one to the other.
Flask-Mail is a convenient wrapper for smtlib, but it requrires that SMTP settings be loaded on app creation. With Flask-Mail, if your user is entering SMTP settings after app creation (which would be the case if the SMTP settings are set via a web-based administrator interface while the app is running), it's not optimal and requires workarounds.
That's where Flask-EZMail comes in. Flask-EZMail is designed to be flexible. You can load SMTP settings at app creation like you would with Flask-Mail, or you can load them at any later time if your user is setting them through an web admin panel. Check out the examples below.
pip install flask-ezmailIf you want to load SMTP settings at app creation and never change them, just like Flask-Mail would expect, you can set up Flask-EZMail like this:
# app/__init__.py
...
from flask_ezmail import Mail
...
<other app creation stuff goes here>
mail = Mail(
server=app.config['MAIL_SERVER'],
username=app.config['MAIL_USERNAME'],
password=app.config['MAIL_PASSWORD'],
port=app.config['MAIL_PORT'],
use_tls=True,
default_sender=app.config['DEFAULT_SENDER'],
debug=app.debug
)In that example, you'd have a global variable called mail that you'd be able to import in your other modules using from app import mail. There's nothing special there, as it's similar to Flask-Mail.
But now instead assume your app is structured so that the user fills out a form in the admin panel that sets SMTP settings after app creation. You could then set up mail this way instead:
from app.forms import EmailSetupForm
from flask_ezmail import Mail
@app.route('/emailsetup', methods=[GET, POST])
def email_setup():
form = EmailSetupForm()
<code to render the form, accept POST data, etc>
#create mail object using data from the form
mail = Mail(
server=form.server.data,
username=form.username.data,
password=form.password.data,
port=form.port.data,
use_tls=True,
default_sender=form.default_sender.data,
debug=False
)You now have a mail object created on the fly! You'll probably want to stash it for later use elsewhere in your app. You have lots of options regarding how to do that; here are two examples:
- You could pickle it and save it to redis:
import pickle
# this assumes you've set up redis in app/__init__.py
current_app.redis.set('mail', pickle.dumps(mail))- Alternatively if you're using Flask-SQLAlchemy, you could create an email model that inherits from
Mail, and save the mail object in your database instead:
# app/models.py
from flask_ezmail import Mail
class Email(Mail, db.Model):
__table_args__ = {'extend_existing': True}
id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
server = db.Column(db.String(128))
port = db.Column(db.Integer)
username = db.Column(db.String(128))
password = db.Column(db.String(128))
default_sender = db.Column(db.String(128))
outgoing_email = db.Column(db.String(128))
use_tls = db.Column(db.Boolean)
use_ssl = db.Column(db.Boolean)
debug = db.Column(db.Boolean, default=False)
max_emails = db.Column(db.Integer)
suppress = db.Column(db.Boolean)If you went the Flask-SQLAlchemy route, any time you need to grab your email client you'd just:
mail = Email.query.first()And if you needed to change an SMTP setting on the fly:
from app import db
from app.models import Email
mail = Email.query.first()
if mail is not None:
mail.server = 'example.net'
db.session.commit()Sending a message uses the same Message object as Flask-Mail (cloned in Flask-EZMail).
from flask_ezmail import Message
msg = Message(
'Test Message',
sender='sender@sender.com',
recipients=['recipient@recipient.com'],
body='Hello!',
)
mail.send(msg)Flask-EZmail likewise uses the same connect() method as Flask-Mail for bulk emails.