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?

  • cablepick@lemmy.cablepick.net
    1·
    1 year ago

    DKIM and SPF will prevent delivery but should not prevent the initial send. Make sure you sending sending an email to yourself first because local email severs check the recipient against their own database before going to the public internet. DKIM and SPF may not matter there so you could at least see delivery.

    This most likely won’t end well as you will hit outbound limits and throttling as well as delivery issues getting into inbox if you get deliveries at all to the major providers. Managing email sucks. The only real way to accomplish this is using third parties that specialize in it. You still have to manage bounce rates and spam flags or they will shut you down too.