Tags: howto, developer, administrator, email

Test Email Setup#

This guide shows how to test the email functionality of pylinkahead locally using a throwaway SMTP server.

Prerequisites#

You need to have pylinkahead installed
You need docker

Steps#

We run Mailpit as a local SMTP server which does not actually send the mails. See the Mailpit documentation for configuration options.

Create a docker compose file:

# ./docker-compose.yml
services:
  mailpit:
    image: axllent/mailpit:v1.29
    command:
      - "--smtp-tls-cert"
      - "sans:localhost"
      - "--smtp-tls-key"
      - "sans:localhost"
    ports:
      - 8025:8025
      - 1025:1025
    environment:
      MP_SMTP_REQUIRE_STARTTLS: true
      MP_SMTP_AUTH_ALLOW_INSECURE: 0
      MP_SMTP_AUTH: "user1:password"

Start the SMTP server:
```
docker compose up -d
```

Configure pylinkahead, add an [Email] section to your pylinkahead.ini:

# ./pylinkahead.ini
[Email]
smtp_server=localhost
smtp_starttls=yes
smtp_tls_verify=no
smtp_port=1025
smtp_username=user1
smtp_password=password
smtp_timeout=1.0
from_address="Test" <test@example.com>
bcc_append=logger@example.com

smtp_tls_verify=no disables certificate verification – safe here because Mailpit runs locally with a self-signed certificate, but never use this in production.

Run interactive tests from the python REPL. A successful call returns None silently; verify delivery in the next step.

>>> from linkahead.utils.email import send_email
>>> send_email(message="test", subject="subj", to="to@example.com", cc="cc@example.com", bcc="bcc@example.com")

Check that the mail arrived: browse to http://localhost:8025.
Finally, shut down Mailpit with docker compose down. This also deletes all test mails.

If you’re interested in how to configure your LinkAhead server so that you can use linkahead.utils.email to send mails, e.g., in your server-side scripts, please check out the administration guide.