Testing your app

Django’s own test runner makes sure your test cases don’t send email, by loading a dummy EmailBackend that accumulates messages in memory rather than sending them. That works just fine with Anymail.

Anymail also includes its own “test” EmailBackend. This is intended primarily for Anymail’s own internal tests, but you may find it useful for some of your test cases, too:

  • Like Django’s locmem EmailBackend, Anymail’s test EmailBackend collects sent messages in django.core.mail.outbox. Django clears the outbox automatically between test cases. See email testing tools in the Django docs for more information.
  • Unlike the locmem backend, Anymail’s test backend processes the messages as though they would be sent by a generic ESP. This means every sent EmailMessage will end up with an anymail_status attribute after sending, and some common problems like malformed addresses may be detected. (But no ESP-specific checks are run.)
  • Anymail’s test backend also adds an anymail_send_params attribute to each EmailMessage as it sends it. This is a dict of the actual params that would be used to send the message, including both Anymail-specific attributes from the EmailMessage and options that would come from Anymail settings defaults.

Here’s an example:

from django.core import mail
from django.test import TestCase
from django.test.utils import override_settings

@override_settings(EMAIL_BACKEND='anymail.backends.test.EmailBackend')
class SignupTestCase(TestCase):
    # Assume our app has a signup view that accepts an email address...
    def test_sends_confirmation_email(self):
        self.client.post("/account/signup/", {"email": "[email protected]"})

        # Test that one message was sent:
        self.assertEqual(len(mail.outbox), 1)

        # Verify attributes of the EmailMessage that was sent:
        self.assertEqual(mail.outbox[0].to, ["[email protected]"])
        self.assertEqual(mail.outbox[0].tags, ["confirmation"])  # an Anymail custom attr

        # Or verify the Anymail params, including any merged settings defaults:
        self.assertTrue(mail.outbox[0].anymail_send_params["track_clicks"])