How to setup basic SMTP for Ghost

Welcome to Ghost, @Michael_Lavelle !

I have 2FA on my personal Gmail, and I’m using that to send Ghost transactional emails on a couple of dev setups. (For production, I use mailgun for transactional email or else my own SMTP server.)

You can turn 2FA on pretty easily for a Gmail account. I don’t think it costs anything or needs special account access. Ghost doesn’t actually USE 2FA when it connects to Google’s SMTP server - it uses the app password, it’s just that you need to have app passwords available, which requires 2FA.

I’ve got a few more details about that setup here: How to deliver Ghost emails from your local dev setup

You certainly don’t have to use Gmail. You could instead configure an outgoing mail server and tell Ghost to use it, or you could set up a mailgun account (needed for newsletters anyway) and tell Ghost to use that. There are options described here:

I think at this point I’ve done all the options listed for transactional email except SES. None of them are terrible to set up, but if you really don’t want to do server setup or any sort, you might also want to give Ghost Pro another look, since they make all that stuff ‘just work’.