How to disable email invites for new user accounts?

Developer help
1

I’m setting up a ghost blog for a project I’m working on and the server which I’m using has the SMTP ports blocked hence ghost is not able to send email invites. My use-case does not even require email invites, I just need to be able to create new user accounts with a default password which can be changed by those users later on. I can’t find any option in ghost which lets me do that.
Does anybody know of any solutions?
Thanks

2

Hi @ork, email invites are the only way to create new users at present. You can setup working email using an external service like mailgun :slight_smile:

3

Hi @Hannah thanks for the response, but mailgun or any other external service would still use SMTP ports and all the smtp ports are blocked in the server.
Does ghost support sending mails using mailgun REST API?

4

@ork which ports specifically are blocked?

25 is typically blocked on most hosts but email providers do not use that port very often these days. Other common SMTP ports are 2525, 465 (SSL/TLS only), and 587 which is usually the recommended port

5

@Kevin To be clear am not allowed to use SMTP on the host so even if one of those ports is enabled that won’t be an option. I’m simply wondering if it is possible to completely disable sending invites or using non-smtp for sending invites for new user accounts?

6

I’ve been researching about this on the github issues and have found several issues related to the topic (Support for REST API based email delivery · Issue #7930 · TryGhost/Ghost · GitHub) but all of them have been closed without any proposed solution and it seems that ghost is still using node-mailer 0.7 so I guess I don’t have any options.

7

I’ve been creating accounts using the JSON import feature. I don’t believe it’s an officially recommended way to create accounts but I haven’t run into any problems yet. If you’re unsure of the proper JSON structure I can update my reply to you later today.

8

@ijongkim It would be great if you can share the json format. Thanks :slight_smile:

9

Here you are, I usually only populate the slug, name, and email fields and do the rest in Ghost Admin.

{
  "data": {
    "posts": [],
    "tags": [],
    "posts_tags": [],
    "users": [
      {
        "id": 2,
        "slug": "slug-goes-here",
        "bio": "You can put up to 200 characters here.",
        "website": "http://websitegoeshere.com",
        "created_at": "Wed, 15 Jan 2020 23:45:00 +0800",
        "created_by": 1,
        "email": "email@domain.com",
        "name": "First Last",
        "profile_image": ""
      }
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "exported_on": "Thu, 3 Aug 2019 13:46:48 +0530",
    "version": "3.0.0"
  }
}
10

@ijongkim Thank you so much this worked like a charm!
Just wanted to add in case anyone else ends up here, once the account is created using the above json its status is ‘Locked’. I had to suspend and then unsuspend the user from the admin panel to make it ‘active’