Cannot set a sender email address in Django or Wagtail send_mail

Question

The task: There is a website, offering a newsletter. I´m sending a newsletter subscription notification to an email address everytime a subscriber subscribes. For this I use send_mail from wagtail.admin.mail – I think it´s not relevant in which way I´m using send_mail.

The problem: I provide a from_email, but for some reason the email I receive contains the EMAIL_HOST_USER as sender – which is the email of the google mail account used for sending emails. I also tried from django.core.mail import send_mail but it´s the same. Is there any clue, how I can manage to make it work? Maybe they block to use custom email address showed as a sender?

Details: smtp.gmail.com and django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend is used for the email backend.

Answer 1

Have a look at django.core.mail.message.EmailMessage

You can explicitly set all the message properties in that class, including the connection and the from_email

For connection, because I use different credentials across my site, I have a model to store connection settings and pull the relevant one for the job in hand.

For instance, in my Contact form class, I have a property for the mail settings:

@property
def mail_settings(self):
    email_settings=EmailSettings.objects.filter(type='contact').first()
    if email_settings:
        use_ssl = getattr(email_settings, 'use_ssl')
        return {
            'host' : getattr(email_settings, 'host'),
            'port' : getattr(email_settings, 'port'),
            'username' : getattr(email_settings, 'username'),
            'password' : getattr(email_settings, 'password'),
            'ssl_setting' : use_ssl,          
            'tls_setting' : not use_ssl
        }

then in the send_mail() method, I get the connection with django.core.mail.get_connection

    connection = mail.get_connection(**self.mail_settings)

You can pass this connection into the EmailMessage constructor.