Ability to send HTML-formatted reports by email

[joserocha]

I'm migrating all my reports from Microsoft Reporting Services to Superset, and one of the features I'm missing is the ability to send reports by email in HTML format. Is there any way to accomplish that?

[dosubot[bot]]

Hi @joserocha! I'm Dosu and I’m helping the superset team.

Superset supports sending scheduled reports and alerts by email in HTML format using its built-in Alerts & Reports feature. You can configure reports to be sent with rich HTML content, including formatted tables, links, and embedded images. To use this, enable the ALERT_REPORTS feature flag in your configuration, set up SMTP email settings, and ensure a headless browser (like Chrome with Playwright or Firefox) is installed in your worker container for screenshot capture. The report scheduling UI lets you choose the report format (text embedded in email, PNG image, or CSV attachment), customize recipients, and set the email subject and body. No extra plugins are needed—this is all supported natively. For more details, see the implementation in the email notification system and report modal UI.

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[joserocha]

@dosu

I don’t want any attachments. I’d like to see the dashboard content displayed directly in the email, built in HTML.

[dosubot[bot]]

Superset can send HTML-formatted emails with rich content like tables, links, and inline images, and you can configure reports to be delivered "inline" (embedded in the email body) rather than as attachments. However, for dashboards, Superset does not embed the full interactive dashboard as HTML in the email body. Instead, it sends a screenshot of the dashboard (as an inline image) or a table of data, not the actual dashboard layout or widgets as HTML. This is due to how Superset's Alerts & Reports feature is implemented, relying on a headless browser to capture and send static images of dashboards rather than rendering the dashboard's HTML structure in the email body reference.

If you want to include formatted tables or descriptions, those will appear as HTML in the email body, but the dashboard itself will not be interactive or fully rendered as HTML. There is currently no built-in support for sending the actual dashboard HTML structure directly in the email body reference.

If you need more technical details or want to explore custom solutions, let me know!

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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[sfirke]

@dosu when you say "Superset can send HTML-formatted emails with rich content like tables, links, and inline images," can you please provide a reference to documentation, a pull request that introduced this functionality, or where in the codebase I would find this?

[dosubot[bot]]

Superset's ability to send HTML-formatted emails with rich content (tables, links, inline images) is implemented in the codebase, not documented officially. The main logic lives in superset/reports/notifications/email.py, where the EmailNotification class builds the HTML email body, sanitizes and embeds tables, and references inline images by content ID. The actual sending is handled by send_email_smtp, which attaches the HTML content as the email body and supports inline images.

Unit tests in tests/unit_tests/reports/notifications/email_tests.py confirm that HTML tags in report descriptions and embedded tables are preserved and rendered in the email body.

The feature was enhanced in PR #30576, which improved HTML formatting, including embedding links and formatting in error emails and report bodies.

There is no official documentation page for this feature, but the code and tests above show how Superset sends HTML emails with rich content.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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[sfirke]

I think this is an interesting idea. I have users who would migrate from SQL Server Reporting Services with related needs. Apache Airflow makes it possible to customize the HTML in emails without having to modify the codebase ... then again, users interact with it by writing code.

Can you say more - would this be admins or users creating HTML templates so that instead of a barebones email from Superset with an Alert or Report, it would be a nicely-formatted email with the same content? Or is this something more expansive?

[joserocha]

I have exactly this need. I’m migrating reports from Microsoft Reporting Services, and some of them include data directly in the body of the email. I have a static template, and within this template, I have, for example, a table showing what I want the user to see.