I might not be fond of Django itself, but one can learn a thing or two from it. For example, if it wasn't for working with Django, I'd probably miss the fact, that you can start a simple smtp server to debug email communications in your apps (no matter the programming language).

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

It's simple as that. Now you can just configure your app to use smtp connection as passed to smtpd server here.