I use Mailtrap - period. I won’t signup for Mailgun and go through the pain of re-configuring my DNS just so Ghost will send emails via SMTP. That is stupid. My configuration is correct based off the examples in your documentation, but Ghost will not work with Mailtrap because someone decided to lock people unfairly into using Mailgun which is not free anymore.
If this is the only choice, then I’d rather find a different blog software completely. One that openly supports SMTP services.
Mailgun x Ghost has been beaten to death.
I’m closing this topic because you’re a new user coming in hot without doing any research.
I did plenty of research @vikaspotluri123 that post you mentioned does not answer the issue.
Ghost does not work with any SMTP mail service provider except Mailgun. There is a Mailgun configuration option in the Admin UI settings page, but nothing for other SMTP services. Because of this, emails, newsletters, subscriptions won’t work unless Mailgun is configured.
So I ask again, why are you forcing Mailgun on people? It doesn’t make sense to force self-hosting users to use a paid SMTP service. When the whole point of self-hosting is to avoid paying for services like SMTP in the first place.
Vikas isn’t forcing Mailgun on anyone. Vikas is a community volunteer, as am I.
For outgoing SMTP for transactional email, you have a wide variety of options. I self host and have at various points used several different SMTP providers for transactional email. Outbound SMTP works (provided your web host doesn’t block it, which is surprisingly common), and lots of people do it.
None of the transactional email settings are exposed in the dashboard. Not Mailgun, not another SMTP server. If you’d done slightly more research, you’d have found directions for configuring outgoing SMTP for transactional email with multiple providers, by editing config.production.json or setting your docker environment variables.
What’s exposed in the dashboard are configuration parameters for newsletter (bulk) email. There, you’re right, the integration with Mailgun is tight. If you want to send your newsletter email via a different service, you could check out Ghosler. ( GitHub - ItzNotABug/ghosler: Send newsletter emails to your Ghost CMS subscribers & members, using your own email credentials! ) No one is forcing your to use Mailgun, but no code that would refactor the current email platform to use an adapter pattern and to contribute support for another platform has been merged yet, either. You could not send a newsletter. You could not use Ghost. You could use Ghost for your web presence but then send your newsletter out in a separate step via the SMTP server or other service of your choice, or with some automation you create.
You’re complaining about software that you use for free. Are you stepping up to fund the work or do the work to code and support an adapter pattern that would make it easier to support additional email providers? Or are you just complaining about the choices made by the devs of an open source project you don’t contribute to?
I had to step away, and Cathy covered most of what I was going to say 
.
For example, in the first thread I linked to, this reply answered your question:
Also, saying that “self-hosting is to avoid paying for services” is a very narrow definition…
3 posts were split to a new topic: More bulk email options