Ghost unable to send emails

Developer help
12

The “Solution” did not work for me, and I think I have a pretty vanilla set up:

  • Fresh (first time) Ghost 4.16.0 installation on Ubuntu on a DigitalOcean Droplet using Ghost-CLI 1.17.3 and all the standard guides.
  • Created A records for @ and * of my custom domain to point at the Ghost server.
  • Ran ghost setup ssl soon after install and have been running https with the custom domain ever since.
  • Using default Casper and the default Portal with just the paid tiers turned off.

So nothing too exciting, but all working really nicely. Next step was to enable subscriptions, so:

"mail": {
    "from": "<FROM ADDR>",
    "transport": "SMTP",
    "options": {
      "service": "Mailgun",
      "host": "smtp.mailgun.org",
      "port": 587,
      "secureConnection": true,
      "auth": {
        "user": "<USERNAME>",
        "pass": "<PASSWORD>"
      }
    }

When I try to sign in to my own site, I get the dreaded “ssl3_get_record:wrong version number” error.

I tried all the suggestions in this thread to no avail. They made no difference.

This thread found a “solution” by removing the port and secure flags entirely, which seems ill-advised.

This thread simply suggests email doesn’t work in Ghost with SSL enabled, which is essentially the same worrying conclusion.

Finally, this thread suggested changing to port 465. After some research I see that it’s not recommended because 587 is well defined and uses the helpful “StartTLS” protocol to negotiate a secure connection. Port 487 is a bit less well-defined, but commonly uses “Implicit TLS”, which is essentially SSL straight out of the gate. So in summary, if port 587 doesn’t work and 465 does, it’s a fine fallback.

And whaddya know, port 587 doesn’t work in Ghost (maybe due to the nginx incompatibility) but Mailgun’s port 465 does! I simply changed the "port" value in my configuration to 465 and all is well.