Sendgrid Email settings for Django

Sendgrid is a production-ready transactional email service you can use in your business. With transactional email services you can:

White label: your email address ([email protected])
Spam-less: Send a LOT of email without being spammed automatically which is likely to happen if you don't use a transactional email service.
Reports & Clicks: Get detailed reporting built-in to the emails. Track clicks, open rates, bounces.
Read more on their FAQ here

Is transactional email the same as marketing email? No. Why? Read about it here.

Setup is super easy and is almost the same as this guide with one key difference: you use an API key as your password and apiuser as your username (not matter which account).

DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE (aka settings.py)

import os

EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.sendgrid.net'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'apikey' # always use this
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = os.environ.get('SENDGRID_API_KEY') # sendgrid.com/settings/api_keys
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True

*Ensure the SMTP is activated in your account

To get your sendgrid API key:

Sign up for an account on sendgrid.com
Navigate to settings
Click create API Keys
Add your api key to your environment variables

How do I load/use environment variables locally & in production in Django projects? Check out the django-dotenv package.

Send a test email on Django:

Ensure in settings.py you have:

ADMINS = (
    ('You', '[email protected]'),
)
MANAGERS = ADMINS

Now you can call the cli command:

python manage.py sendtestemail --admins

Use --managers instead of --admins if you want to send to your list of MANAGERS instead of ADMINS in your settings.py configuration.