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.
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: "crystals.rest.lm@gmail.com" smtp_password: "[the password]" # Address to send emails from, eg "noreply@your-instance.com" smtp_from_address: "crystals.rest.lm@gmail.com" # 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