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: "abc@fastmail.se"
    smtp_password: "fastmail_user_password_here"
    smtp_from_address: "noreply@lemmy.today"
    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: "my_email@fastmail.com"
    smtp_password: "password"
    smtp_from_address: "my_email@fastmail.com"
    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.

  • Slashzero@hakbox.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • smartwater0897OP
      1·
      2 years ago

      Federation works fine, the only thing that doesnt is the email sending for some reason. :/

        • mrmanager@lemmy.today
          2·
          2 years ago

          I checked the logs for postfix (since I use docker I can just do “docker logs”) but no errors.

          It all silently fails. I guess it has to do with email servers dropping the emails. I will look into using some other email server, maybe on aws if that works for other people.

          But I have verified that I can connect to the email server with starttls, and even base64 encoded my username and password and did an interactive “Auth login” session with the email server. All was fine, I was authenticated.

          So probably something with the reply from, maybe… Very confusing.

          • Slashzero@hakbox.social
            1·
            2 years ago

            You are hosting your own postfix, right? Most mail servers will just outright reject your messages. You can add your site’s certs to postfix, so that your mail is not clear text, and that would allow some to go through (but gmail would still block all of them).

            What I ended up doing was signing up for brevo.com and their free tier allows 300 mail messages every 24 hours. Another option would be to use gmail’s smtp relay, which I think allows 300 - 500 emails per day, or something long those lines.

            brevo.com is actually pretty nice as it gives you stats on mail click throughs, etc.