django-anymail VS sendgrid-python

I would strongly suggest that you take a look at the django-anymail package. Using it will allow you to be able to swap between ESPs (if you are no longer please by their services) without having to refactor your code (switching packages/sdk). It has been a big time saver in a project of mine and the maintainer of the package responds quickly to any issues or questions you might have.

Once you switch to a transactional email service provider like mailgun, sendgrid or SES (as others have suggested), also take a look at the django anymail project: https://anymail.dev/ for a super seamless integration.

Popular answers include DRF, django-extensions, anymail, allauth and the DJDT.

I use django-anymail as the email backend. It hooks into Django and allows you to easily swap in and swap out different email providers. That way you're provider agnostic and can avoid vendor lock-in. Did Sendgrid hike their prices? Change three lines of code and use Amazon SES.

I use SendGrid with its dynamic templates via its Python library.

Install the SendGrid python library Finally you can install the python library. The documentation gives you some simple examples on how to send your first emails. I did not need to dig much further, those are great. This project uses the "Without Mail Helper Class" example, that I implemented in my contact_secret_santa() class method.

FWIW the reason I'm doing this is because I'm inserting some text into a message that will be sent as email. The message can either be inserted as plain text or converted to html. I'm trying to apply the HtmlContent from sendgrid.

You're talking about this, right? Where's the part that changes the protocol used? https://github.com/sendgrid/sendgrid-python/blob/main/use_cases/kitchen_sink.md

To install the sendgrid package on your machine, refer to SendGrid's GitHub installation guide or directly install via pip install sendgrid.

You can use sendgrid. They have a decent python library and they have a free plan as well. The library is pretty straight forward to setup.