django.core.mail.send_mail() is not using settings values

[Zach Bresser]

Hello, I have found a bug in django.core.mail.send_mail()

I previously had the following SETTINGS:

# Email settings
EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp-relay.gmail.com'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'my_user'
EMAIL_HOST_PASS = 'my_pass
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True

and the following view:

def index(request):
    """ Return landing page with contact form """

    if request.method == 'GET':
        # Init a blank form
        form = ContactForm()
    else:
        # Grab data from POST, validate, and attempt to send mail.
        form = ContactForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            subject = form.cleaned_data['subject']
            from_email = form.cleaned_data['from_email']
            message = form.cleaned_data['message']
            try:
                send_mail(subject, message, from_email, [my_to_email])
            except BadHeaderError:
                # Fail on invalid header.
                return HttpResponse('Invalid Header found.')
            # After sending, redirect to /success
            return redirect('success/')
        # return blank form
    return render(request, 'index.html', {'form': form})

Which are all correct (I'm using gsuite so I use smtp-relay.gmail.com instead of smtp.gmail.com).

I spent hours working on it, even tried sendgrid, was getting Unauthenticated Senders Not Allowed, and contacted their support and none of us were able to get it to work.

Finally I tried explicitly setting auth_user and auth_pass in send_mail(), and it finally worked.

After importing setting variables:

send_mail(subject, message, from_email, ['my_to_address'],
                          auth_user=EMAIL_HOST_USER, auth_password=EMAIL_HOST_PASS)

This makes it seem like it is not falling back to the settings variables. I attempted to diagnose the issue, but was unable to. I hope someone else can solve where it needs to be set.

[Simon Charette]

Hello there, I unfortunately cannot reproduce your issue against Django 2.0 and we've got ​unit tests asserting settings fallbacks work correctly.

Unless you're able to provide a reduced test case to help us reproduce your issue I'm afraid we'll have to close this ticket as worksforme.

[Zach Bresser]

Can we reopen this? At least in my case it was not falling back to the settings variables.

I am working on getting a test case together for Simon. I work full time so I have been unable to do it today.

[Simon Charette]

Zach, feel free to re-open the ticket if you can provide a simplified reproduction test case.