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Selfhosted @lemmy.world FrayDabson @vlemmy.net

[Help needed] issue self hosting lemmy and email smtp

I am trying to setup my own lemmy server. I used ansible.

I can access my server via my domain just fine. But emails are not working.

First i had my mail and mx records pointing to privateemail via namecheap.

Then i tried using cloudflare email routing and their mx records.

neither worked for me with error connecting.

I thought maybe using dovecot? But self hosting email is new to me

I was hoping to use namecheaps privateemail but wasn’t sure how to get it working.

The email account worked and can send / receive but Lemmy and postfix cannot communicate with it.

Now I have no Mx records as I’m not sure what I should be using I am sure I am missing something obvious but idk what

Any ideas ?

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  • Thank you to those that helped. As I figured I was being a noob and missing a key piece. Based off the instructions and my experience I didn’t realize I need to get a free or paid smtp service and point postfix to that server. Everything seems to be working now.

    • Summarizing the relevant parts of an eerily similar conversation I had the other day:

      If you are using the built-in mail relay then you aren’t signing your mail with DKIM, don’t have SPF set up right, don’t have a DMARC policy, and don’t have FcRDNS, all of which basically any mail provider will require from you to even consider accepting your mail. Basically without all of that literally anyone can pretend to be whatever.com and send email from it. They really shouldn’t be shipping that mail relay at all IMO, it just leads to confusion. More than likely you would already know if you need a mail relay and be able to set it up yourself if so.

      Sendgrid and Postmark are popular transactional mail services (which is what sort of email you will be sending, google that term to find more options). If you want some help getting your own mail server set up in a dockerized way I run my mail using docker-mailserver and if only set up for outgoing mail it is pretty easy to run, though you will probably run into deliverability issues as the large providers (google, microsoft, apple, etc) can be real assholes and assume anything from a non-large provider is spam. Feel free to ask me about how to do it if you are interested though, the more people run their own mail the better it gets for all of us.

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