Question

In PHP I can send an email simply by calling mail(). In Django, I need to specify SMTP backends and other things.

Is there a simpler way to send email from Django?

Answer 1

There are several good mail-sending functions in the django.core.mail module.

For a tutorial please see Sending e-mail:

Although Python makes sending e-mail
relatively easy via the smtplib
library, Django provides a couple of
light wrappers over it. These wrappers
are provided to make sending e-mail
extra quick, to make it easy to test
e-mail sending during development, and
to provide support for platforms that
can’t use SMTP.

The simplest function that would most likely suit your purposes is the send_mail function:

send_mail(
    subject, 
    message, 
    from_email, 
    recipient_list, 
    fail_silently=False, 
    auth_user=None, 
    auth_password=None, 
    connection=None)