Mail Servers

Inevitably your application will need to send and/or receive emails and thus you will need to understand how to work with Mail Servers. Very few individual developers run their own mail servers these days, but knowing how to work with servers maintained by your organization or by an external Software as a Service is critical to being able to setup your application for production.

Goals/Objectives/Outcomes

• Understand the different types of email servers and how they are used
• Understand how to configure your application to use an SMTP server for email
• Understand how to retrieve mail into your application from a POP or IMAP Server
• Understand how to troubleshoot problems with mail server options and application configurations

Reference Material

• http://www.samlogic.net/articles/mail-server.htm
• http://whatismyipaddress.com/mail-server
• http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/pop3-smtp-and-other-e-mail-server-types
• https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/topics/email/
• https://www.christiaan.com/thoughts/django-email-form-and-smtp-settings-tutorial/
• https://docs.python.org/2/library/poplib.html
• http://www.voidynullness.net/blog/2013/07/25/gmail-email-with-python-via-imap/

Measures of Success

• Participant can articulate the difference between POP, SMTP and IMAP servers and describe how each are used
• Participant has successfully configured their application to receive and/or send email.
• Participant understands the resources available for debugging email issues within their application.