RuntimeWarning: DateTimeField received a naive datetime

The problem is not in Django settings, but in the date passed to the model. Here's how a timezone-aware object looks like:

>>> from django.utils import timezone
>>> import pytz
>>> timezone.now()
datetime.datetime(2013, 11, 20, 20, 8, 7, 127325, tzinfo=pytz.UTC)

And here's a naive object:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.now()
datetime.datetime(2013, 11, 20, 20, 9, 26, 423063)

So if you are passing email date anywhere (and it eventually gets to some model), just use Django's now(). If not, then it's probably an issue with an existing package that fetches date without timezone and you can patch the package, ignore the warning or set USE_TZ to False.

Use django.utils.timezone.make_aware function to make your naive datetime objects timezone aware and avoid those warnings.

It converts naive datetime object (without timezone info) to the one that has timezone info (using timezone specified in your django settings if you don't specify it explicitly as a second argument):

import datetime
from django.conf import settings
from django.utils.timezone import make_aware

naive_datetime = datetime.datetime.now()
naive_datetime.tzinfo  # None

settings.TIME_ZONE  # 'UTC'
aware_datetime = make_aware(naive_datetime)
aware_datetime.tzinfo  # <UTC>