Check if an object exists

I think the easiest from a logical and efficiency point of view is using the queryset's exists() function, documented here:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/ref/models/querysets/#django.db.models.query.QuerySet.exists

So in your example above I would simply write:

if User.objects.filter(email = cleaned_info['username']).exists():    # at least one object satisfying query existselse:    # no object satisfying query exists

Since filter returns a QuerySet, you can use count to check how many results were returned. This is assuming you don't actually need the results.

num_results = User.objects.filter(email = cleaned_info['username']).count()

After looking at the documentation though, it's better to just call len on your filter if you are planning on using the results later, as you'll only be making one sql query:

A count() call performs a SELECT COUNT(*) behind the scenes, so you should always use count() rather than loading all of the record into Python objects and calling len() on the result (unless you need to load the objects into memory anyway, in which case len() will be faster).

num_results = len(user_object)

the boolean value of an empty QuerySet is also False, so you could also just do...

...if not user_object:   do insert or whatever etc.