Sending emails from Django during development without using a real SMTP server. Python comes with a very basic and integrated SMTP server. To start it just open a terminal and type: python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025 Then configure your settings.py using the following parameters. You will see the email directly in the terminal …

settings.py

if DEBUG:
    EMAIL_HOST = 'localhost'
    EMAIL_PORT = 1025
    EMAIL_HOST_USER = ''
    EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = ''
    EMAIL_USE_TLS = False
    DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = '[email protected]'

An even easier solution is to set the email backend to the console backend, as this doesn't require running an SMTP server in a separate process and results in email contents getting printed to stdout directly:

if DEBUG:
    EMAIL_BACKEND = "django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend"

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Another option is to use 'inbucket' which is a fake email SMTP/POP3 server, with a Web UI to preview the emails.
Run it locally with docker-compose is super easy:

services:
  mail:
    image: inbucket/inbucket:stable
    ports:
      - 2500:2500 # SMTP
      - 1100:1100 # POP3
      - 9000:9000 # web interface