Case study

To tie together some of the principles presented in this chapter, let's build a mailing list manager. The manager will keep track of e-mail addresses categorized into named groups. When it's time to send a message, we can pick a group and send the message to all e-mail addresses assigned to that group.

Now, before we start working on this project, we ought to have a safe way to test it, without sending e-mails to a bunch of real people. Luckily, Python has our back here; like the test HTTP server, it has a built-in Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server that we can instruct to capture any messages we send without actually sending them. We can run the server with the following command:

python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025

Running this command at a command prompt will start an SMTP server running on port 1025 on the local machine. But we've instructed it to use the DebuggingServer class (it comes with the built-in SMTP module), which, instead of sending mails...