Gmail Schedule Send Email in Django

Question

I want to mimic the functionality that Gmail has, where you can choose to send an email at a certain time (maybe 3:34 am tomorrow) in Django.

I looked at something like django-crontab (https://pypi.org/project/django-crontab/).

I came up with an idea to use django-crontab to achieve this:

1. Make a crontab that runs every minute
2. Every minute, check if there are any emails that need to be sent
3. Send out those emails

This feels a bit hacky and over-engineered. Is there a better way? Thanks!

Answer 1

You can check out celery and how to integrate it with django. Once done, task scheduling is easy,first add your gmail configuration in settings.py as follows:

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django_smtp_ssl.SSLEmailBackend'
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.gmail.com'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'your_email'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'your password'
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = EMAIL_HOST_USER
EMAIL_PORT = 465

Then in your tasks.py you can add the function for scheduling emails as follows:

from django.template.loader import render_to_string
from django.core.mail import EmailMessage


@periodic_task(
run_every=(crontab(hour=3, minute=34)), #runs exactly at 3:34am every day
name="Dispatch_scheduled_mail",
reject_on_worker_lost=True,
ignore_result=True)
def schedule_mail():
    message = render_to_string('app/schedule_mail.html')
    mail_subject = 'Scheduled Email'
    to_email = getmail
    email = EmailMessage(mail_subject, message, to=[to_email])
    email.send()

Then finally your email template 'schedule_mail.html'

{% autoescape off %}
Hello ,

This is a test email
if you are seeing this, your email got delivered!

Regards,
Coding Team.
{% endautoescape %}

And the command to run celery service as beat:

celery -A yourapp beat --loglevel=info

replace 'yourapp' with name of your app. Cheers!!