E mail notifications

The CodaLab web site requires the ability to send e-mails when a user forgets her password and requests a password reset. The functionality is only needed for future scenarios.

We use the SendGrid add-on to Windows Azure to send e-mails via SMTP.

The SendGrid developer's documentation explains how to integrate the e-mail service in Django. In addition, the Django project provides comprehensive documentation: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/email/. Additional notes are collected below.

Settings

The key settings which affect how e-mailing works are:

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.sendgrid.net'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = '<insert username>'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = '<insert password>'
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = '[email protected]'
SERVER_EMAIL = '[email protected]'

The Site configuration also plays a role because it defines the domain name associated with the web site. The site domain name and a human-readable name of the web site are defined in the settings by:

CODALAB_SITE_DOMAIN = 'codalab.org'
CODALAB_SITE_NAME = 'CodaLab'

The initialize.py script inserts these names in the database. Recall that initialize.py is located in codalab\scripts and is used to insert constants into the database. To illustrate how the site info is used, consider the e-mail sent to a user resetting his password:

Subject: [CodaLab] Password Reset E-mail
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 22:42:55 -0000

You're receiving this e-mail because you or someone else has requested a password 
for your user account at codalab.org. It can be safely ignored if you did not request 
a password reset. Click the link below to reset your password.

http://codalab.org/accounts/password/reset/key/1-3le-6640241efe4e5b77f4e5/

In case you forgot, your username is someuser.

Thanks for using our site!

The subject field of the e-mail uses the verbase name of the site, while the body of the e-mail includes several references to codalab.org which is given by the site's domain name.

Testing without sending e-mails

As noted in the Django documentation, one can avoid sending e-mails during development but still see them in the console by setting:

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'

This is the default configuration for the base Dev configuration.