Hey all I have no idea what I’m doing here trying to set up a Lemmy instance. I’ve made simple servers before but nothing like the setup needed for this especially surrounding email verification.
I’m like 10 tutorials deep and on day 3 of trying to figure out what is going on with Postfix. There are so many words and acronyms being thrown around I don’t even know what I’m looking at anymore let alone knowing what the right questions to ask would be.
Very likely I’m going to nuke my droplet this weekend to make sure I have a fresh start with no half-baked solutions competing with each other. Would someone be willing to set up a time with me this weekend on Discord or something and baby step me through how to get this thing up and running?
Where are you at? What is your problem specifically?
I’m in US, Washington state. I haven’t been able to get my server to send verification emails and it ended up creating ghost users. I thiiiink I got those all cleared out using some SQL commands. I’ve been seeing a number of posts and various guides on how to get my server to send emails. The instance says it sends one but then nothing is ever received in my inbox. I’ve been trying to figure out Postfix to do outgoing emails. It has been installed/uninstalled many times, including a handful of various other tools that different tutorials have had me install and configure.
Thing is I don’t even know if I’m configuring anything correctly. Like the MX record in digitalocean, I’m still unclear about how hostname and FQDN get used in the various Postfix and MX settings. The problem I’m running into is every time I turn around I find increasingly arcane things to try and check like a recent post in the support community here talked aobut DKIM, SPF, DMARC, RcRDNS, what in the world does all that mean and how do they potentially fit into what I’ve already tried…
Are you trying to set up your own email server? That’s more trouble than it is worth just for SMTP on your Lemmy instance. I’m using zoho for smtp for example.
Here are my configs to use for a docker setup if it helps https://git.minnix.dev/minnix/lemmy_configs
What is an external web server proxy, and by ‘host postfix for email’ does that mean using Postfix installed/configured on my server?
Are you doing this as an exercise or are you doing this because you just want your own instance?
If the latter, why not use a managed hosting provider so that you don’t have to worry about any of that?
Historically I make my own things because I like knowing how stuff works (or at least kinda knowing how it works). I’m a programmer but generally I’m on the like C++/C# game programming side of things and learning server stuff is very difficult for me. Always out to learn more though
Just use an external SMTP provider. You will have a bad time with sending emails otherwise.
Do you mean something like Brevo? And if so is there a good guide for how to link that kind of thing up with Lemmy?
You can use lots of email providers, even gmail, and authenticate with their SMTP server to send messages. Sending unsolicited email directly to another mail server will 100% cause it to become spam. There are 30 years of anti-spam ‘webs-of-trust’ and now validating technologies that, if you don’t setup, will guarantee your emails do not get delivered.
Any email provider will do. I think you can even enable it for gmail accounts. You can just put in the connection details in the lemmy.hjson.
If you’re standing something up for yourself, and it doesn’t have to be anything fancy, any email provider that provides SMTP *will work.
This even includes gmail: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229?hl=en
But, another thing to remember is that many hosting providers block the default ports by default. Many will open the port with a customer service ticket but others will only do it at a certain “tier” of service.
You mentioned a droplet so I googled digital ocean and smtp, and this thread popped up: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/sending-email-with-do-app-is-it-possible
I, personally, use linode as my provider and I had to open a ticket with support in order to unblock the right ports to send email.
As an aside:
Standing up an email server itself is a good exercise because it’s an absolute PITA. Mainly due to trust and ensuring all your DNS records are right and stuff.
Overall, it’s a nifty exercise to understand but I, personally, don’t really feel like it’s worth the pain.
Edit: forgot to finish a sentence
Why are you trying to set up an instance? What’s your use-case?
They want to start an instance for star wars fans because they like captain picard. :)
