Earlier quoted context omitted.
When building a small web app a few weeks ago, I tried to avoid additional dependencies, too. I was a bit stuck when I need to send an email asynchronous. Do you have a _simple_ recommendation to solve this without pulling something huge like celery+redis in to solve this task?
Depends on what you need. The bare minimum is to just spawn process so the request can return and your email can send. You tend to lack much control of failure conditions that way so you'd want to have some code in in the normal request/response cycle that checks for success or failure and informs the user. You could add your emails to a db table and have a cron job consume them. But for sending an occasional email?…
Maybe I will try something simpler like http://stackoverflow.com/a/4447147