zope.sendmail is a package for email sending from Zope 3 applications. Email sending from Zope 3
applications works as follows:
A Zope 3 application locates a mail delivery utility (IMailDelivery) and feeds a message to it.
It gets back a unique message ID so it can keep track of the message by subscribing to IMailEvent
events.
The utility registers with the transaction system to make sure the message is only sent when the
transaction commits successfully. (Among other things this avoids duplicate messages on ConflictErrors.)
If the delivery utility is a IQueuedMailDelivery, it puts the message into a queue (a Maildir
mailbox in the file system). A separate process or thread (IMailQueueProcessor) watches the queue and
delivers messages asynchronously. Since the queue is located in the file system, it survives Zope
restarts or crashes and the mail is not lost. The queue processor can implement batching to keep
the server load low.
If the delivery utility is a IDirectMailDelivery, it delivers messages synchronously during the
transaction commit. This is not a very good idea, as it makes the user wait. Note that transaction
commits must not fail, but that is not a problem, because mail delivery problems dispatch an event
instead of raising an exception.
However, there is a problem – sending events causes unknown code to be executed during the
transaction commit phase. There should be a way to start a new transaction for event processing
after this one is commited.
An IMailQueueProcessor or IDirectMailDelivery actually delivers the messages by using a mailer (IMailer)
component that encapsulates the delivery process. There currently is only one mailer:
ISMTPMailer sends all messages to a relay host using SMTP.
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