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.

  • Matej@matejc.comEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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).

    • smartwater0897@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      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?

      • HSL@wayfarershaven.euEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        I was able to get Brevo working on Hetzner with the following block:

          email: {
    smtp_server: "smtp-relay.sendinblue.com:587"
    smtp_login: "your_email"
    smtp_password: "smtp_key"
    smtp_from_address: "your_email"
    tls_type: "starttls"
  }

        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.