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:
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.
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.
My instance had the same problem, the problem was that Hetzner (where I host my server) by default is not permitting outbound smtp ports. For me the solution was to use alternative port and even that a starttls alternative port which AWS SES luckily supports (that is what I am using for smtp server). Alternative would be also to just ask Hetzner to unblock the port (people have reported success with this method).
Actually it seems that port 587 is open (starttls) while port 465 (tls) is closed. I can connect to port 587 on my email server from my Hetzner instance (im also using them).
But how should the config look like to forward emails? How does your config look like?
Interestingly, it wasn't working when I gave up and went to bed. I happened to do something on the instance today and much to my surprise, an email came through. Maybe Brevo holds the emails/doesn't immediately allow SMTP?
if that hadn't worked, my next step was going to test sending email through the console as described in another comment.
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.
You can replace postfix:25 with smtp.fastmail.com:465 in the config. Verify that you need tls and not starttls as the ssl type.
If this is docker then you need to ensure the container can route to their server and port. I don’t use docker so I can’t help you there but I think it’s something about internal vs external bridge.
Did you try sending an email through OpenSSL using shell commands? Lemmy has no test email function so you need to be sure your credentials are correct.
It’s not uncommon for email servers to prevent you from sending as someone else even if you authenticate against your primary account. When using the OpenSSL shell commands it should end a successful test send with 250 ok queued or display an error like from not owned by primary account.
Are you hosting your instance in a cloud provider? Some may block outgoing SMTP ports as a spam-prevention measure. Other instance admins have reported Digital Ocean as one of those providers.
If it successfully connects on 587, but you're not getting mail, then it might be your from address.
I'm not sure about fastmail, but on my email provider, the "from" address has to be valid and assigned to the login account. Most reputable providers enforce this to prevent email spoofing. It is also required so DKIM signing and SFP records can be validated against the domain of the "from" address.
I'm sure what you posted here are pseudo values, but is your [email protected] address valid in your fastmail account? If not, then try setting the "from" address to the address you use to log in.
Similar, I'm assuming gmail is a no go? I feel like theoretically it should work but it's not. However, this may be because I'm using elest.io -> docker, but something's fucked up with my domain's SSL and it's signed by itself. It gives the browser a big huge 'ol unsecured warning, so I would assume that because that's messed up it's causing gmail to not accept it? I've opened a ticket with them, so eventually maybe I can figure out if that's the case, I've never had a problem pointing namecheap domains to anything before.
It says this, but I assure you, the password is correct.
lemmy_server::api_routes_websocket: email_send_failed: permanent error (535): 5.7.8 Username and Password not accepted. Learn more at5.7.8 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=BadCredentials [long chain of numbers and letters I'm not sure matter] - gsmtp
The settings
# Email sending configuration. All options except login/password are mandatory
email: {
# Hostname and port of the smtp server
smtp_server: "smtp.gmail.com:587"
smtp_login: "[email protected]"
smtp_password: "[the password]"
# Address to send emails from, eg "[email protected]"
smtp_from_address: "[email protected]"
# Whether or not smtp connections should use tls. Can be none, tls, or starttls
tls_type: "tls"
}
I also did start stattls and that didn't work. Tried swapping ports around, nope.
edit: fixed the ssl issue with elest.io, they just had a configuration wrong, but tbf lemmy support was added literally yesterday
second edit: I just didn't use gmail and instead made a zoho mail account that worked out after a lot of setting up