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Django Custom Email Form Field for Email Pie

As you know Django’s forms.EmailField() is capable of validating email addresses but what if you wanted to validate the existence of a particular email address? I’ve found a pretty neat solution for that, it’s called Email Pie. Email Pie is a wonderful little JSON API that gives you a simple way to validate email addresses. We’ll let you know if that email address is legit or not.. You could either use the service hosted on emailpie.com or run your own instance (it’s open source). In this post, I’m going to show you how to write a custom form field that makes use of Email Pie.

Make sure you pip install requests and simplejson before proceeding. Now create a fields.py file with the following content:

fields.py
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import requests
import simplejson

from django import forms
from django.core.exceptions import ValidationError


EMAIL_PIE_HOST = 'http://emailpie.com'  # change this if you run your own instance

def validate_email_pie(value):
    params = {'email': value}
    response = requests.get('%s/v1/check' % EMAIL_PIE_HOST, params=params)
    response = simplejson.loads(response.content)

    if not response['success']:
        raise ValidationError(response['errors'][0]['message'])


class EmailPieField(forms.EmailField):
    default_validators = [validate_email_pie]

validate_email_pie method makes GET request to Email Pie and gets back a response. The service checks for email format and mx records, it also catches misspellings (you can get it with response['didyoumean']). validate_email_pie raises ValidationError if the service detects an invalid email address. Now in your forms you can use EmailPieField like this:

forms.py
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from django import forms
from .fields import EmailPieField

class ContactForm(forms.Form):
    name = forms.CharField()
    email = EmailPieField()

For those interested, here are some tests for the field :)

tests.py
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from django.test import TestCase
from django.core.exceptions import ValidationError
from .fields import EmailPieField


class EmailPieFieldTest(TestCase):

    def test_invalid_email(self):
        email_field = EmailPieField()
        self.assertRaises(ValidationError, email_field.clean, 'email@totest')

    def test_invalid_mx(self):
        email_field = EmailPieField()
        self.assertRaises(ValidationError, email_field.clean, 'email@totest.com')

    def test_valid_email(self):
        email_field = EmailPieField()
        self.assertEquals(email_field.clean('nam@namis.me'), 'nam@namis.me')

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