EMAIL.md

Email API

To send account confirmation and password reset emails, Flask-Security uses Flask-Mailman. Flask-Mailman has an SMTP backend, but it wasn't working with mailtrap. To fix this, backend.py implements a custom email backend for Flask-Mailman that uses the mailtrap api to send emails instead of SMTP.

The EmailBackend inherits from the Flask-Mailman BaseEmailBackend. It overrides the send_messages() function and uses the helper function _send() to send EmailMessage objects using the mailtrap API.

_send() POSTs email messages to https://send.api.mailtrap.io/api/send as JSON data

msg_data = {
            'from': {'email': os.environ.get('MAIL_DEFAULT_SENDER'),
                    'name': 'Colby Athlete Managment System'},
            'to': [{'email': message.to[0]}],
            'subject': message.subject,
            'text': message.body
            }

The mailtrap API uses a token in the POST request header

headers = {
    'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + os.environ.get('MAIL_AUTHORIZATION'),
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

The custom backend is somewhat limited. It does not implement the open() or close() methods for persistent connections. It also cannot currently send an email to more than one recipient. It would not be difficult to add this functionality but it is unneccessary for just sending account confirmation and password reset emails.