Source: 📖 Django for Professionals ch9 p140

Setting up an email service

• [x] sign up for a service
• [ ] Override/write EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
• [ ] Configure EMAIL_HOST, EMAIL_HOST_USER, EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD, EMAIL_PORT, EMAIL_USE_TLS according to service provider instructions.

The first step in setting up a third party email service is to sign up — use SendGrid, MailGun, Amazon, or any other, and set up an SMTP service on their site. You'll be given some credentials and configurations.

Next we configure our email client in settings.py""

# settings.py
...

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.sendgrid.net'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'apikey'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = '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'
EMAIL_PORT = 25
EMAIL_USE_TLS = False

Note that EMAIL_BACKEND may already be defined to output to the console if previously set up for development purposes. Here we override it. All other configurations will be provided by your service once you set up an SMTP service.