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Lemmy Support @lemmy.ml smartwater0897 @lemmy.ml

Cant get email to work on my instance

I cant get my email sending to work on my instance. After trying for hours, i wanted to ask for some support here since im quite stuck and dont understand.

I installed Lemmy using ansible so everything is set up in a very standard way - except email.

I want my instance to send email to an external smtp server (Fastmail) whenever there is a need to send an email (user registration, password reset, etc).

Currently the email settings in lemmy.hjson looks like this:

  email: {
    smtp_server: "postfix:25"
    smtp_login: "[email protected]"
    smtp_password: "fastmail_user_password_here"
    smtp_from_address: "[email protected]"
    tls_type: "tls"
  }

It seems like i need to have postfix:25 as the smtp server. What i really want is to put smtp.fastmail.com:465 here since thats what i want to use to send email. But that doesnt seem to work.

So I understand I need to send email through postfix, but then I wonder, how should the config look like to send emails to smtp.fastmail.com on port 465 (which is what they have on fastmail), with a specific username and password used on the fastmail server?

I think a lot of people are having issues with the email part of the setup, judging from the many reports of spinning buttons on user signup... this is a very likely reason, specially since there is no error message to the user.

Please help me sort this out, how should i configure this?

EDIT:

Ok after a lot of experiments and help from people below, this was the solution.

  email: {
    smtp_server: "smtp.fastmail.com:587"
    smtp_login: "[email protected]"
    smtp_password: "password"
    smtp_from_address: "[email protected]"
    tls_type: "starttls"
  }

Using this, email sending finally works. I couldnt use something else in the smtp_from_address. Which means my real email gets shown to users, so I will probably create another email address for this purpose completely.

Also specific to Hetzner instances, they dont block port 587 so you can use that with starttls.

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  • Hi there! Going to take a minute to read through your post, as I banged my head against a the SMTP setup wall for several hours.


    Edit ah, ansible, not Docker. Could still be the same issue though. Look in your lemmy backend instance logs for any timeout errors. If you see any, it means your lemmy backend can’t make any outgoing calls and you need to fix that.

    Your email setup looks fine, but if your lemmy instance can’t make outgoing calls federation won’t work either.

    Are you sure that’s the right port? Usually SMTP port 25 is blocked by most providers, and a different port is used.

46 comments