Mail from mandatory?

Developer help Self-hosting
1

Hi!

I’ve installed on my server, on production, last version of Ghost, with docker compose.

On my .env file I’ve this:

mail__transport=SMTP
mail__options__from=my@email.it
mail__options__host=smtp.provider.com
mail__options__port=465
mail__options__secure=true
mail__options__auth__user=sergej@example.com
mail__options__auth__pass=MyPassword

With this options I can’t login and on docker logs I have:

ghost | [2025-09-16 18:43:22] WARN Missing mail.from config, falling back to a generated email address. Please update your config file and set a valid from address

What’s wrong?

Thanks,
Sergio

2

I also have this exact same issue, self-hosted with coolify. just posted in Unable to log in as admin - #13 by GGAlanSmithee

3

Hey Sergio,

I ran into the same warning before, and in my case, Ghost wasn’t recognizing the mail.from setting—even though it looked fine in my .env file. What fixed it for me was double-checking the key name to make sure it was exactly correct, restarting the Ghost container so it would reload the environment variables, and then verifying that the config.production.json inside the container actually showed the right “from” address. Once I did that, the warning went away.

You might want to run through those steps too, just to be sure Ghost is pulling in the updated value properly.