Transactional mail with Digital Ocean

Developer help Self-hosting
1

Hi all,

I have ghost setup on a Digital Ocean droplet. It has been working fine for a long time but now the signup flow is broken.

I can see that the configuration allows me to connect to Mailgun - and to be clear I’m connecting to the EU server (if that makes a difference) but where Ghost uses an API connection to send newsletters out, it seems to use an SMTP relay to connect to Mailgun.

This is problematic because Digital Ocean have now locked down all the SMTP ports and I think that’s why my subscription flow is broken.

I’ll share the config here in case anyone can spot any gotchas or obvious mistakes. I have tried a number of different variations including Gmail and having no mail block at all but nothing is working.

Ultimately this means people cannot sign up or subscribe just at the moment when we need them to be able to.

"mail": {
    "from": "fromname",
    "transport": "SMTP",
    "options": {
      "host": "smtp.eu.mailgun.org",
      "service": "Mailgun",
      "port": "587",
      "auth": {
        "user": "[REDACTED]",
        "pass": "[REDACTED]"
      }
    }
  },

Any thoughts? I’ve spent about ten hours trying to solve this issue and it’s really challenging me.

2

Port 2525 should work, still :slight_smile:

2 Likes
3

Thank you for this incredibly quick response. I have spent about ten hours trawling through advice and configuration information, trying and failing and trying and failing. Writing this forum query was my last roll of the dice.

This simple change to PORT 2525 resolved everything.

I am so grateful to you for documenting this. Thank you :folded_hands:t3:

Robin

1 Like
4

Glad you’re fixed! You may want to consider setting up api access instead of smtp-based access. You’re less likely to run afoul of the next time DO decides to add to their blocked ports…

2 Likes
5

Thank you for this. Yes I feel the same way, the API is rugged and robust and SMTP is sometimes a bit flakey.

I have switched over to this solution and I can confirm that THIS WORKS TOO!

Thank you :folded_hands:t3:

Robin

1 Like