Hi, I just installed my instance with Ansible.
Now following this doc to check if email is set up correctly. However I didn’t receive an email to reset the password.
I doubled checked that I have email in my account settings. Used telnet localhost 25 to verify the hostname is my domain.
What am I missing?
Where is it hosted? at home or some VPS?
Some ISPs and VPS hosts block outgoing SMTP
Thank you so much! That explains it!
It is hosted on google cloud, and I just found the doc saying that outgoing SMTP is blocked https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/tutorials/sending-mail#using_standard_email_ports.
I will look into third-party email services.
And many mail providers block all incoming mail from dynamic IP address pools.
We’re going to need more details. Are you hosting your own email server, or are you using a transactional mail provider like mailgun?
I was hosting my own email server, and outgoing SMTP is blocked by the VPS. I will look into a transactional mail provider.
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Makes sense to use a transactional mail provider (Like SparkPost, SendGrid, Mailgun) or MXroute. because self hosting email nowadays can be a dreadful journey 😑
Yeah, thank you for the information! I will look into that!
Just found that this is what I should do when hosting the instance on Google cloud https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/tutorials/sending-mail#choosing_a_third-party_email_service_to_use.
Self-hosting a mail server is pretty straightforward to setup using stuff like mailcow these days. The main issues are having the ports opened, and getting the big email providers to accept mails from your server. It’s usually pretty smooth assuming you have an ip address with a good reputation.
I am not too sure about this. The OP only needs outgoing email for a Lemmy instance. Setting up a self-hosted email server for just that, having to keep the software updated and avoid or solve problems with outgoing emails would not be my choice in this case. This blog post going viral in 2022 https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html had some points. If you still think that self hosting email is easy, go hang out in the Disroot XMPP community chat for a while and you may hear some Disroot admins swear about email delivery problems, especially with email to Microsoft.
Well, I’m actually self-hosting an email server with mailcow for one of my projects and it’s been pretty smooth, with minimal maintenance. Just running some upgrade command every once in a while to upgrade the docker container, and attaching a bigger disk when the old one was almost full. The biggest blocker was asking my VPS vendor to open up the port as they’ll only open it for customers older than 6 months.
Most of the problems encountered by those people you mentioned are probably because they’re running it for other people. You can’t control what other people send so you’ll eventually get blocklisted when one of your users starts sending spam because their account was hacked.
Yes, sure, self-hosting email can go fine for a long time, depending on the amount of users that you have and what your users do (For example : try bulk email) and whom they want to email with, or send emails to mailing lists, or use email forwarding. The OP wants to run a Lemmy instance and have email out working, probably just for notifications. Using a transactional email provider for the latter seems like a sensible choice to me.
