Settings > Email newsletter showing blank page

I am unable to see or configure the mail settings for the newsletter. The settings page doesn’t show up in the settings menu and when I try to go there directly the page is blank. When I send a test mailer it uses direct mail, not mailgun.

My issue looked similar to this one, and I saw the same message.

  • Updated from v3.10 to v3.42 and then to v4 (members beta was toggled off before update)
  • Changed config mail settings from Direct to Mailgun (I’ve tried all combination of ports/secure transport options with same result).
"mail": {
    "transport": "SMTP",
    "options": {
      "service": "Mailgun",
      "auth": {
        "user": "post@mail.prereview.org",
        "pass": "[pass]"
      }
    }
  },
  • Restarted Ghost
  • Tried to send test newsletter and got the error saying I need to configure mail settings.
  • Ran the following sql:
select * from settings where `group` = 'email';
  • And saw that mail settings were all set to null.
  • Tried deleting all those settings and restarting, they were set again to null
  • Manually set mail settings
mysql> select * from settings where `group` = 'email';
+--------------------------+-------------------+----------------------------------------------------+---------+---------------------+--------------------------+---------------------+--------------------------+-------+-------+
| id   | key               | value                        | type    | created_at          | created_by               | updated_at          | updated_by               | group | flags |
+--------------------------+-------------------+----------------------------------------------------+---------+---------------------+--------------------------+---------------------+--------------------------+-------+-------+
| [id] | mailgun_domain    | mail.prereview.org           | string  | 2021-03-18 01:35:56 | 5cbf8a6633f00a72f3a62f9c | 2021-03-18 01:35:56 | 5cbf8a6633f00a72f3a62f9c | email | NULL  |
| [id] | mailgun_api_key   | [mg api key]                 | string  | 2021-03-18 01:35:56 | 5cbf8a6633f00a72f3a62f9c | 2021-03-18 01:35:56 | 5cbf8a6633f00a72f3a62f9c | email | NULL  |
| [id] | mailgun_base_url  | https://api.mailgun.net/v3   | string  | 2021-03-18 01:35:56 | 5cbf8a6633f00a72f3a62f9c | 2021-03-18 01:35:56 | 5cbf8a6633f00a72f3a62f9c | email | NULL  |
| [id] | email_track_opens | true                         | boolean | 2021-03-18 01:35:56 | 5cbf8a6633f00a72f3a62f9c | 2021-03-18 01:35:56 | 5cbf8a6633f00a72f3a62f9c | email | NULL  |
+--------------------------+-------------------+----------------------------------------------------+---------+---------------------+--------------------------+---------------------+--------------------------+-------+-------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

And

  • How was Ghost installed and configured?
    • Via CLI
  • What Node version, database, OS & browser are you using?
    • Mysql, Node v12.21.0, Ubuntu

Hi @jhand thank you so much for making a separate thread!

When you open the settings screen in admin and it is blank - are there any errors in the developer console?

No errors. And I couldn’t find any errors in the server logs either (though was really lost on how to even start debugging that).

This is very odd! To answer how to view errors in the logs, the easiest way is to run ghost log -e in your ghost directory.

Now that you’ve set all the values manually, does sending a newsletter still fail?

It is working and it looks like it is sending through Mailgun now after all.

This is what my settings looks like (Instead of hiding them maybe graying them out would have been very helpful. I was so confused trying to find the email settings area after the upgrade and had to upgrade another blog to figure out where they should be).

I realized this is maybe because I am not the site owner. Can you only see these settings as owner?

I am accessing the email settings link from the new dashboard:
image

Okay I’ve confirmed you can only access these settings as site owner.

Is that intended? As a site owner, I’d like other folks to be able to access the newsletter design settings. And as an admin on other sites, I need to update/set the email settings and having to do so via the database seems wrong (and undocumented).

Because the email settings is linked on dashboard, this is a bug not just preference/misunderstanding. So I’ve opened an issue on github.

@Hannah is there any way to get this issue resolved? I’ve put in a PR to fix it: Allows administrators to update email settings by joehand · Pull Request #1880 · TryGhost/Admin · GitHub

This was fixed in a recent release.