Gmail SMTP with Ghost docker (alpine)

Developer help Installation
1

I’ve read everything I can find on this forum (and other places) regarding this topic, but I still can’t for the life of me figure out why I can’t send a simple invite to add people as contributors/authors.

Below is the error messages I got from the container’s log via portainer:

Error sending email: Failed to send email. Reason: queryA ETIMEOUT smtp.gmail.com. Please check your email settings and resend the invitation.
Error: queryA ETIMEOUT smtp.gmail.com

at createMailError (/var/lib/ghost/versions/4.41.3/core/server/services/mail/GhostMailer.js:67:12)

at QueryReqWrap.onresolve [as oncomplete] (dns.js:210:19)

I’m running Ghost on the latest alpine docker image, behind a traefik reverse proxy (I doubt traefik is the reason for the error). I don’t use a config.production.json file, so everything is coded into my docker-compose.yml as below:

version: '3.1'
services:
  ghost:
    container_name: ghost
    image: ghost:4-alpine
    restart: always
    security_opt:
      - no-new-privileges:true
    ports:
      - 1234:1234
    environment:
      url: https://photos.DOMAIN.COM
      mail__transport: SMTP
      mail__from: name@gmail.com <name@gmail.com>
      #mail__options__service: 'gmail' (I've tried with this line active as well)
      mail__options__host: 'smtp.gmail.com'
      mail__options__port: 465 #SSL
      mail__options__secure: 'true'
      mail__options__auth__user: 'name@gmail.com'
      mail__options__auth__pass: 'app_password' # Google's app password for "less secure apps"
    volumes:
      - /share/FOLDER/ghost/blog:/var/lib/ghost/content # bind mount for persistent volume
    labels:
      # Traefik rules
      - "traefik.enable=true"
      - "traefik.http.routers.ghost.entrypoints=http"
      - "traefik.http.routers.ghost.rule=Host(`photos.DOMAIN.COM`)"
      - "traefik.http.middlewares.ghost-https-redirect.redirectscheme.scheme=https"
      - "traefik.http.routers.ghost.middlewares=ghost-https-redirect"
      - "traefik.http.routers.ghost-secure.entrypoints=https"
      - "traefik.http.routers.ghost-secure.rule=Host(`photos.DOMAIN.COM`)"
      - "traefik.http.routers.ghost-secure.tls=true"
      - "traefik.http.routers.ghost-secure.service=ghost"
      - "traefik.http.services.ghost.loadbalancer.server.port=1234"

Any pointers as to what I might be doing wrong?

2

Can you drop inside the container and make sure you have network connectivity.

Installing telnet or such and ensure you can connect to the port works be helpful for diagnostics.

3

I’ll see if I can get Telnet installed via Homebrew on my Mac (and just FYI my Ghost docker is running on a QNAP NAS). But I’m quite sure the connection to my Ghost docker is fine though, since I can access Ghost simply via photos.DOMAIN.COM (I have the domain pointed to my NAS’s IP) as referred to in my docker-compose.yml in my original post. In fact everything works pretty much as expected other than the email issue.

4

I just tried using telnet to connect to photos.DOMAIN.COM, but it appears telnet times out. I checked the IP it pointed to – it was a Cloudflare IP, and rightly so, as my domain has been proxied behind Cloudflare. Not sure why it would time-out over telnet though, as I can connect to my Ghost blog without any issues simply by pointing my browser towards photos.DOMAIN.COM. Any pointers?