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.
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.