Incomplete Amazon SES docs, issue raising for Ghost Dev Docs, SMTP testing, From address formatting

While setting up my mail settings in my self-hosted Ghost installation with the official dev docs, I stumbled across some missing info:

The section here (Configuration - Adapt your publication to suit your needs) describes the config file entries for Amazon SES.

However, since Port 465 is used which correlates to TLS, NOT STARTTLS, on the SES service, the config should also include “secure”: true, like in the Secure connection paragraph above it.
Does the line “service”: “SES” change anything about the backend handling of the entered details, like SMTP channels and security settings?

The docs repository on GitHub is archived (GitHub - TryGhost/docs: Ghost's official documentation), any plans to allow community issue raising and PRs for the documentation in the future again or is the way forward through support?

And I noticed that the Labs option to test the SMTP settings is gone. Some blogs mention it (Configuring and Testing SMTP email functionality in your Ghost blog | HostArmada), but since the blog entry is from 2020, it is out of date.
Is the only available option to test the settings to invite an arbitrary mail address as a staff member and see if the invite arrives?

Another topic is the formatting of the From address.
We have two ways, just specifying the Mail From address or From name AND the From address.
From name should be in single quotes ( ’ ’ ). But these show up in the header on any transactional mails which is not nice.
Does the Ghost backend need these to be able to read the From header? Is it possible to strip these before creating the mail excerpt to be sent?

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I’m having trouble getting SES to work too: How can I use Amazon SES with Ghost? - Stack Overflow

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Please have a look at my blog post I wrote on that topic in the meantime: RfC: How to use Amazon SES with Ghost CMS correctly

I published it since the Ghost team didn’t acknowledge this forum post for over 4 months now…

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It’s very discouraging how broken and incomplete the documentation is and how they’re not helping in the forums, so I’ll probably bail on Ghost. I can’t afford to waste energy on this.

But I really appreciate your blog post! I might give it one last go.

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I hear you. I had a discussion on this with the CEO of the Ghost Foundation and he redirected me to their Code of Conduct where they essentially tell us that since they are a small team they can’t tend to everything.

However, from my point of view, this shows they are taking the community aspect too lightly. If the staff doesn’t have time to monitor the forum closely, then appoint moderators or other voluntary positions that will fill that gap.

I myself am currently only still on Ghost and self-host it since I still enjoy how easy it is to publish my posts and this barely outweighs my complaints with it up until now.
But if I will run into any major roadblock again in the future, as I did multiple times in the past, I will switch to another system once and for all.

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@go_tesla it looks to me like most posts in the forum get a reply from a moderator or staff member if they don’t get a community response. The post here asks five different questions. It may have attracted more replies if some smaller, more focused posts were used instead.

Ghost provided as a free, open source product. Having used a lot of open source software, the quality of the code, docs, install experience and community support are all pretty high here. That’s a lot to get for free! It’s not magic, though.

To scale, people either need to pay for the paid hosting service or help the community by answering questions in the forum or contribute to the docs and code. Here, I see some feedback about the docs went unheard, and I see how that can be frustrating. Since it’ s a non-profit feature that means the paid developers are busy, the team is going to miss some forum posts and sometimes it may take more than one attempt at contributing.

Those who stick around will become better known and have an easier time getting their ideas heard in the future.

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Thanks for your input on this.
I specifically put all my questions into this one post since they all discuss missing or inaccurate documentation.
So why run into the danger of getting the post deleted when asking 5 questions via 5 posts, all about the docs, instead of having them in one post?

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