In django send_mass mail creates a new http connection everytime it sends a mail

Question

I have a use case where I need to send 16000+ users unique mails. To do this I am using mandrill api( djrill). To make it more efficient and optimized I am trying to use send_mass_mail functionality along with celery.

While doing so I was checking the celery logs and found that for each email, the celery worker is creating a new http connection.

[2015-06-22 14:23:30,745: INFO/Worker-4] Starting new HTTPS connection (1): mandrillapp.com
[2015-06-22 14:23:31,521: INFO/Worker-4] Starting new HTTPS connection (1): mandrillapp.com
[2015-06-22 14:23:32,162: INFO/Worker-4] Starting new HTTPS connection (1): mandrillapp.com

This will be crippling for our network and will consume a lot of bandwidth.

Here is my code to do the same

@shared_task
def test_email_mass(merge_vars):

    messages = []   

    if DEBUG:
        for k,v in merge_vars.iteritems():
            message = []
            print v['content']

            message.append(title)                                        
            message.append(v['content'])
            message.append('[email protected]')
            message.append([k])           
            messages.append(tuple(message))
        send_mass_mail(tuple(messages), fail_silently=False)

I was expecting that the above code will create only a single http connection.

Edit : I tried the following too.

 connection = get_connection()
    if DEBUG:
        for k,v in merge_vars.iteritems():
            message = []

            msg = EmailMessage(from_email="[email protected]", subject=title)
            msg.template_name = "standard"
            msg.to = [k]
            msg.from_name = from_name
            messages.append(msg)              
    connection.send_messages(messages)
    connection.close()

It still shows that it creates a new http connection everytime.