Getting Started

django-email-bandit provides additional email backends for Django which reroute outgoing emails to another email address, typically a shared inbox or group email. Included in the intercepted message body is a list of the original recipients. This allows you to test functionality on your site which might otherwise send out emails to your users. Additionally, it allows recipient emails to be white-listed so that they are sent without modification to the original recipient(s). By default, django-email-bandit will not intercept emails to ADMINS, meaning that it will not interfere with the standard 500 error emails provided by Django.

Installing

The recommended method for installing django-email-bandit is using pip:

pip install django-email-bandit

The rest of this guide assumes that you have installed the latest stable version via pip.

Necessary Settings

Configure the following settings in your project settings.py. Add bandit to your INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # Other installed apps included here
    'bandit',
)

This is required to auto-discover the templates included with the application. To begin intercepting emails, change your EMAIL_BACKEND setting to one of the included backends. bandit.backends.smtp.HijackSMTPBackend is used to change the behavior of the default SMTPBackend backend:

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'bandit.backends.smtp.HijackSMTPBackend'

Finally you should set BANDIT_EMAIL to a valid email address where you will receive the emails which are intercepted:

BANDIT_EMAIL = 'bandit@example.com'

Customizing the Template

An optional step is to customize the templates used when an email is intercepted. The hijacked message body will contain a header defined by the bandit/hijacked-email-header.txt template. This template is given the context:

{
    'message': message,  # Original EmailMessage object,
    'previous_recipients': previous_recipients,  # List of the original recipients
    'previous_cc': previous_cc,  # List of the original CC'ed recipients
    'previous_bcc': previous_bcc,  # List of the original BCC'ed recipients
}

Note that the default header template doesn’t include previous_cc or previous_bcc, so you’ll need to create a custom template if you need those displayed.