Do MAILGUN_SENDER_DOMAIN and DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL need matching domains when using Django AnyMail?

[JumpingMountain]

I’m working with Django AnyMail and MailGun for email delivery. Here’s my current configuration:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'anymail',
    'myapp',
]

ANYMAIL = {
    "MAILGUN_API_KEY": "<my-api-key>",
    "MAILGUN_SENDER_DOMAIN": 'mail.mysite.org',
}
EMAIL_BACKEND = "anymail.backends.mailgun.EmailBackend"
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = "[email protected]"

I recently updated my setup so that MAILGUN_SENDER_DOMAIN and the domain part of DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL are no longer identical. After this change, my email sending functionality stopped working completely. I suspect that MailGun requires both domains to match for successful email delivery, but I can’t find clear information about this requirement in the official docs. Has anyone encountered this issue before? Is domain matching actually mandatory for the integration to work properly?

[Mia92]

yeah, ran into this same issue recently. mailgun’s strict about sender domains - you can’t send from any domain without verifying it first. check your mailgun control panel under sending > domains and make sure mysite.org is added, not just mail.mysite.org. that domain mismatch is def causing your failures.

[CreativePainter33]

MailGun doesn’t require domain matching, but you’re missing something important. When you set MAILGUN_SENDER_DOMAIN as ‘mail.mysite.org’, that exact subdomain needs verification in your MailGun dashboard. Sending from ‘[email protected]’ while only having ‘mail.mysite.org’ authorized? MailGun will reject those emails. I hit this same problem last year. Two fixes: add ‘mysite.org’ as an authorized domain in MailGun, or change DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL to ‘[email protected]’. First option’s cleaner - recipients won’t see that extra subdomain. Check your MailGun logs for authentication failures to confirm this is what’s happening.

[HappyDancer99]

Domain verification is definitely your problem. MailGun whitelists every sending domain - you’ve got to explicitly authorize each one in your account settings. I learned this the hard way when I switched from single domain to multiple subdomains. MailGun treats each domain and subdomain as completely separate entities that need their own verification. Your MAILGUN_SENDER_DOMAIN tells AnyMail which verified domain to use for API calls, but if DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL points to an unverified domain, the service just silently drops those messages. Go to your MailGun dashboard and add mysite.org as a verified domain alongside your existing mail.mysite.org entry. You’ll need to add DNS records for verification, so give it time to propagate before you test again.