To Blog or Not To Blog

django.core.mail.send_mail provides a very convenient abstraction to send an email to multiple recipients. But calling send_mail is a blocking call. This means that if you want to send an email in response to a user action, the server will not respond till the email is sent. This problem is magnified when you have to send multiple emails for a user action. Imagine sending emails to 10-15 people in a thread to notify of a new comment.

I decided to change the send_mail function to non-blocking call. The result is the following code,

from django.core.mail import send_mail as django_send_mail
import threading
from datetime import datetime as dt
 
def send_mail(subject, message, from_email, recipient_list,
          fail_silently=False, auth_user=None, auth_password=None):
 
    class Sender(threading.Thread):
 
        def run(self):
                django_send_mail(subject, message, from_email,
                         recipient_list, fail_silently, auth_user, auth_password)
 
    s=Sender()
    s.start()
    return True

The code has a function send_mail which serves as a wrapper on the django.core.mail.send_mail function. When called, the function simply creates a thread and returns so the response for user is instantaneous. The thread then calls the django.core.mail.send_mail (imported as django_send_mail).

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Programming, Technology, Web-Development, django non-blocking, send_mail, threading, Tips & Tricks