Frequently asked questions

The following notes answer some common questions, and may be useful to you when installing, configuring or using django-contact-form.

What versions of Django and Python are supported?

django-contact-form 5.2.0 supports Django 4.2, 5.1, and 5.2, and Python 3.9 through 3.13. See Django’s Python support matrix for details of which Python versions are compatible with each version of Django.

What license is django-contact-form under?

django-contact-form is offered under a three-clause BSD-style license; this is an OSI-approved open-source license, and allows you a large degree of freedom in modifying and redistributing the code. For the full terms, see the file LICENSE which came with your copy of django-contact-form; if you did not receive a copy of this file, you can view it online at <https://github.com/ubernostrum/django-contact-form/blob/trunk/LICENSE>.

Why aren’t there any default templates?

Usable default templates, for a Django application designed to be widely reused, are essentially impossible to produce; variations in site design, block structure, etc. cannot be reliably accounted for. As such, django-contact-form provides bare-bones (i.e., containing no HTML structure whatsoever) templates in its source distribution to enable running tests, and otherwise just provides good documentation of all required templates and the context made available to them.

Why am I getting a bunch of BadHeaderError exceptions?

Most likely, you have an error in your ContactForm subclass. Specifically, one or more of from_email, recipient_list or subject() are returning values which contain newlines.

As a security precaution against email header injection attacks (which allow spammers and other malicious users to manipulate email and potentially cause automated systems to send mail to unintended recipients), Django’s email-sending framework does not permit newlines in message headers. BadHeaderError is the exception Django raises when a newline is detected in a header. By default, subject() will forcibly condense the subject to a single line.

Note that this only applies to the headers of an email message; the message body can (and usually does) contain newlines.

I found a bug or want to make an improvement!

The canonical development repository for django-contact-form is online at <https://github.com/ubernostrum/django-contact-form>. Issues and pull requests can both be filed there.

If you’d like to contribute to django-contact-form, that’s great! Just please remember that pull requests should include tests and documentation for any changes made, and that following PEP 8 is mandatory. Pull requests without documentation won’t be merged, and PEP 8 style violations or test coverage below 100% are both configured to break the build.