Amazon SES SMTP with Django

Question

I'm trying to use Amazon's new SMTP service for SES with Django 1.3.1 but I'm not having much luck.

I've created my SES SMTP credentials and have this in my settings:

EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
EMAIL_HOST = 'email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'my-smtp-user'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'my-smtp-password'
EMAIL_PORT = 465

Then I try sending a test email (from and to verified email addresses):

from django.core.mail import send_mail

send_mail('Test subject', 'This is the body', '[e-mail]',['[e-mail]'], fail_silently=False)

But I get the following error:

SMTPServerDisconnected: Connection unexpectedly closed

I can telnet to the server:

telnet email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com 465

Any thoughts?

Thanks, G

Answer 1

I took like 3 hrs breaking my head over it. Your solution about the smtplib with s.starttls() and then s.login() is good with a python program with all the email credentials in the same file. But I don't think it is a clean way to do it in Django. So I finally figured it out. Irrespective of whether your machine is a 32 or a 64 bit. Just do the following steps:

1. Install boto

   pip install --upgrade boto

2. Install django-ses

   pip install django-ses

3. In your djando settings.py file update the following info.

   EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django_ses.SESBackend'
   AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = 'your_username'
   AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = 'your_password'

4. In your django file where you want to send an email

   from django.core.mail import send_mail
   send_mail('Test subject', 'This is the body', '[e-mail]',['[e-mail]'],fail_silently=False)