Tutorial¶

This section covers basic tutorials of Flask Red Mail. It is advised to consult Red Mail’s documentation for more advanced use of sending emails.

Installation¶

Install the package:

pip install flask-redmail

Initiation¶

To initiate Flask Red Mail, simply:

from flask import Flask
from flask_redmail import RedMail

app = Flask(__name__)
email = RedMail(app)

In case you prefer lazy initiation, you may also use init_app method:

from flask import Flask
from flask_redmail import RedMail

app = Flask(__name__)
email = RedMail()
email.init_app(app)

Configuration¶

Flask Red Mail reads the configurations from the app.config. You may pass these simply:

app.config["EMAIL_HOST"] = "<SMTP HOST>"
app.config["EMAIL_PORT"] = 587
app.config["EMAIL_USERNAME"] = "me@example.com"
app.config["EMAIL_PASSWORD"] = "<PASSWORD>"

# Set default sender
app.config["EMAIL_SENDER"] = "no-reply@example.com"

Note that you don’t have to specify EMAIL_USERNAME and EMAIL_PASSWORD if your SMTP server does not require those.

Full list of configurations:

Configuration	Optional	Description
EMAIL_HOST	No	Host address of the SMTP server.
EMAIL_PORT	No	Port of the SMTP server. Often 587.
EMAIL_USERNAME	Yes	User to authenticate to the SMTP server.
EMAIL_PASSWORD	Yes	Password to authenticate to the SMTP server.
EMAIL_SENDER	Yes	Default sender address for emails.
EMAIL_USE_STARTLS	Yes	Whether to use STARTLS. Defaults True.
EMAIL_CLS_SMTP	Yes	SMTP class to use for connection. Defaults `smtplib.SMTP`.

Sending Emails¶

After configuring, you may send emails simply using the send method:

@app.route("/send-email")
def send_email():
    email.send(
        subject="An example",
        receivers=["you@example.com"],
        html="""
            <h1>Hi,</h1>
            <p>This is an example message</p>
        """
    )

Method `RedMail.send is simply a wrapper of the method redmail.EmailSender.send.

Note

You may also create HTML body templates to the template/ folder (or where you store your HTML Jinja templates) and pass the relative path of the template as html_template argument.

Defaults¶

In some cases it may be useful to create several instances of RedMail for various purposes and set default subjects, receivers, senders, bodies etc.:

newsletter = RedMail(
    subject="News letter",
    sender="news@example.com",
    html_template="email/news.html"
)

@app.route("/send-news")
def send_news():
    newsletter.send(
        receivers=["you@example.com"]
    )

The keyword arguments passed to RedMail are set as attributes to redmail.EmailSender when creating the sender. These are stored as a dict in attribute kws_sender in RedMail instance.

Note that the default values passed to initiation of RedMail overrides the configurations from app.config and the arguments passed to email.send overrides both app.config and email.kws_sender.

What’s Next?¶

See more examples from Cookbook.