Hey all I have no idea what I’m doing here trying to set up a Lemmy instance. I’ve made simple servers before but nothing like the setup needed for this especially surrounding email verification.
I’m like 10 tutorials deep and on day 3 of trying to figure out what is going on with Postfix. There are so many words and acronyms being thrown around I don’t even know what I’m looking at anymore let alone knowing what the right questions to ask would be.
Very likely I’m going to nuke my droplet this weekend to make sure I have a fresh start with no half-baked solutions competing with each other. Would someone be willing to set up a time with me this weekend on Discord or something and baby step me through how to get this thing up and running?
Here are my configs to use for a docker setup if it helps https://git.minnix.dev/minnix/lemmy_configs
What is an external web server proxy, and by ‘host postfix for email’ does that mean using Postfix installed/configured on my server?
Where are you at? What is your problem specifically?
I’m in US, Washington state. I haven’t been able to get my server to send verification emails and it ended up creating ghost users. I thiiiink I got those all cleared out using some SQL commands. I’ve been seeing a number of posts and various guides on how to get my server to send emails. The instance says it sends one but then nothing is ever received in my inbox. I’ve been trying to figure out Postfix to do outgoing emails. It has been installed/uninstalled many times, including a handful of various other tools that different tutorials have had me install and configure.
Thing is I don’t even know if I’m configuring anything correctly. Like the MX record in digitalocean, I’m still unclear about how hostname and FQDN get used in the various Postfix and MX settings. The problem I’m running into is every time I turn around I find increasingly arcane things to try and check like a recent post in the support community here talked aobut DKIM, SPF, DMARC, RcRDNS, what in the world does all that mean and how do they potentially fit into what I’ve already tried…
Just use an external SMTP provider. You will have a bad time with sending emails otherwise.
Do you mean something like Brevo? And if so is there a good guide for how to link that kind of thing up with Lemmy?
You don’t have to learn postfix to send emails with Lemmy. Just put in the host name and credentials to your email server in the Lemmy settings.
As an example, I use fastmail so I used the settings they say on this page:
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000279921-IMAP-POP-and-SMTP
For you, you may use something else (maybw Google, and then you have to Google on how to set up smtp with Google).
Why are you trying to set up an instance? What’s your use-case?
They want to start an instance for star wars fans because they like captain picard. :)
Are you doing this as an exercise or are you doing this because you just want your own instance?
If the latter, why not use a managed hosting provider so that you don’t have to worry about any of that?
Historically I make my own things because I like knowing how stuff works (or at least kinda knowing how it works). I’m a programmer but generally I’m on the like C++/C# game programming side of things and learning server stuff is very difficult for me. Always out to learn more though
