Question

# settings.py
EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.filebased.EmailBackend'

# view.py
from django.core.mail import send_mail

def send_letter(request):
    the_text = 'this is a test of a really long line that has more words that could possibly fit in a single column of text.'
    send_mail('some_subject', the_text, '[e-mail]', ['[e-mail]'])

The Django view code above, results in a text file that contains a broken line:

this is a test of a really long line that has more words that could possibl=
y fit in a single column of text.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyone know how to change it so the output file doesn’t have linebreaks? Is there some setting in Django that controls this? Version 1.2 of Django.

Update – to back up a level and explain my original problem 🙂 I’m
using the django-registration app, which sends an email with an
account activation link. This link is a long URL, with a random
token at the end (30+ characters), and as a result, the line is breaking in the middle of the token.

In case the problem was using the Django’s filebased EmailBackend, I switched to the smtp backend and ran the built-in Python smtpd server, in debugging mode. This dumped my email to the console, where it was still broken.

I’m sure django-registration is working, with zillions of people using it 🙂 So it must be something I’ve done wrong or mis-configured. I just have no clue what.

Update 2 – according to a post in a Django list, it’s really the underlying Python email.MIMEText object, which, if correct, only pushes the problem back a little more. It still doesn’t tell me how to fix it. Looking at the docs, I don’t see anything that even mentions line-wrapping.

Update 3 (sigh) – I’ve ruled out it being a MIMEText object problem. I used a pure Python program and the smtplib/MIMEText to create and send a test email, and it worked fine. It also used a charset = “us-ascii”, which someone suggested was the only charset to not wrap text in MIMEText objects. I don’t know if that’s correct or not, but I did look more closely at my Django email output, and it has a charset of “utf-8”.

Could the wrong charset be the problem? And if so, how do I change it in Django?

Here’s the entire output stream from Django’s email:

---------- MESSAGE FOLLOWS ----------
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Subject: some_subject
From: [e-mail]
To: [e-mail]
Date: Tue, 17 May 2011 19:58:16 -0000

this is a test of a really long line that has more words that could possibl=
y fit in a single column of text.
------------ END MESSAGE ------------

Answer 1

You might be able to get your email client to not break on the 78 character soft limit by creating an EmailMessage object and passing in headers={‘format’: ‘flowed’} Like so:

from django.core.mail import EmailMessage

def send_letter(request):
    the_text = 'this is a test of a really long line that has more words that could possibly fit in a single column of text.'
    email = EmailMessage(
        subject='some_subject', 
        body=the_text, 
        from_email='[e-mail]', 
        to=['[e-mail]'],
        headers={'format': 'flowed'})

    email.send()

If this doesn’t work, try using a non-debug smtp setup to send the file to an actual email client that renders the email according to rules defined in the email header.