Help

Getting support

Anymail is supported and maintained by the people who use it—like you! Our contributors volunteer their time (and most are not employees of any ESP).

Here’s how to contact the Anymail community:

“How do I…?”

If searching the docs doesn’t find an answer, ask a question in the GitHub Anymail discussions forum.

“I’m getting an error or unexpected behavior…”

First, try the troubleshooting tips in the next section. If those don’t help, ask a question in the GitHub Anymail discussions forum. Be sure to include:

  • which ESP you’re using (Mailgun, SendGrid, etc.)

  • what versions of Anymail, Django, and Python you’re running

  • the relevant portions of your code and settings

  • the text of any error messages

  • any exception stack traces

  • the results of your troubleshooting (e.g., any relevant info from your ESP’s activity log)

  • if it’s something that was working before, when it last worked, and what (if anything) changed since then

… plus anything else you think might help someone understand what you’re seeing.

“I found a bug…”

Open a GitHub issue. Be sure to include the versions and other information listed above. (And if you know what the problem is, we always welcome contributions with a fix!)

“I found a security issue!”

Contact the Anymail maintainers by emailing security<at>anymail<dot>dev. (Please don’t open a GitHub issue or post publicly about potential security problems.)

“Could Anymail support this ESP or feature…?”

If the idea has already been suggested in the GitHub Anymail discussions forum, express your support using GitHub’s thumbs up reaction. If not, add the idea as a new discussion topic. And either way, if you’d be able to help with development or testing, please add a comment saying so.

Troubleshooting

If Anymail’s not behaving like you expect, these troubleshooting tips can often help you pinpoint the problem…

Check the error message

Look for an Anymail error message in your console (running Django in dev mode) or in your server error logs. If you see something like “invalid API key” or “invalid email address”, that’s often a big first step toward being able to solve the problem.

Check your ESPs API logs

Most ESPs offer some sort of API activity log in their dashboards. Check their logs to see if the data you thought you were sending actually made it to your ESP, and if they recorded any errors there.

Double-check common issues

  • Did you add any required settings for your ESP to the ANYMAIL dict in your settings.py? (E.g., "SENDGRID_API_KEY" for SendGrid.) Check the instructions for the ESP you’re using under Supported ESPs.

  • Did you add 'anymail' to the list of INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py?

  • Are you using a valid from address? Django’s default is “webmaster@localhost”, which most ESPs reject. Either specify the from_email explicitly on every message you send, or add DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL to your settings.py.

Try it without Anymail

If you think Anymail might be causing the problem, try switching your EMAIL_BACKEND setting to Django’s File backend and then running your email-sending code again. If that causes errors, you’ll know the issue is somewhere other than Anymail. And you can look through the EMAIL_FILE_PATH file contents afterward to see if you’re generating the email you want.

Examine the raw API communication

Sometimes you just want to see exactly what Anymail is telling your ESP to do and how your ESP is responding. In a dev environment, enable the Anymail setting DEBUG_API_REQUESTS to show the raw HTTP requests and responses from (most) ESP APIs. (This is not recommended in production, as it can leak sensitive data into your logs.)