Now let's actually implement our email client in the project.

Setting up URL Patterns

Make sure you've added a URL pattern for your new endpoint in your app's urls.py file.

from django.urls import path

from . import views

urlpatterns = [

path('send-test-email/', views.send_test_email, name='send_test_email'),

]

Just to be clear, in our example, we created a email_client app in our Django project. We need to create a urls.py file in the app directory (if it's not created already), and add that above URL path.

If it's not already, make sure your app's URLs are included in the project's urls.py.

from django.contrib import admin

from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [

path('admin/', admin.site.urls),

path('documentation/', include('documentation.urls')),

]

This urls.py file should be sitting in the same directory as settings.py.

Setting up Views

Last thing is to add our view function to actually send the email.

from rest_framework.decorators import api_view

from rest_framework.response import Response

from django.core.mail import send_mail

from django.conf import settings

@api_view(['POST'])

def send_custom_email(request):

recipient = request.data.get('recipient')

subject = request.data.get('subject', 'No Subject')

message = request.data.get('message', 'No message provided.')

if not recipient:

return Response({'error': 'Recipient email is required.'}, status=400)

try:

send_mail(

subject,

message,

settings.DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL,

[recipient]

)

return Response({'message': f'Email sent to {recipient}.'}, status=200)

except Exception as e:

return Response({'error': str(e)}, status=500)

Every time this endpoint is hit, an email will be sent to the specified recipient. Of course, we could modify the view function with lots of improvements.

If this scenario was a user submitting a contact form, the view function could be changed to send a confirmation that the email was received to the user's email, and the form contents could be emailed to you.
Create a custom email template. This is something usually limited when using the free tier of other email clients.
We didn't utilize the models.py file. We could adjust the view function to also save copies in the database.

Part of: Django Email Client