Today I set up a couple of Ghost instances on ReclaimCloud, and pointed my domain at them successfully via an A record. All good.
It can’t send email though. I don’t mean mailing-list emails, I just mean single transactional emails – like adding Staff accounts. When I try to invite someone, I get a red banner error that says
Error sending email! Error sending email: Failed to send email. Reason: connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:587. Please check your email settings and resend the invitation.
What the heck email settings does that refer to? Any clues?
We mostly use Ghost for newsletters around here, so it seems like I hadn’t tested the new installer for setups that weren’t using Mailgun. I saw you put in a ticket and updated you there as well, but I’m investigating how to get Ghost to work with any old SMTP server, and I’ll reach back out.
I responded to John in an email, but wanted to document this here as well for anyone that stumbles upon this:
I’ve updated and tested our installer to work better with email setups other than Mailgun. Ghost has a built-in fallback email option called “direct email” via the Nodemailer package it uses internally, and in my testing it doesn’t seem to work in Docker based setups.
The best option is to use an external SMTP server. You can make an Email account in cPanel on Shared Hosting and set up Ghost to use that as its SMTP server, you could use Mailgun (which is free for under 1000 emails per month), or you could use some other SMTP server you have access to.
I used cPanel to make an email account, then went to the “Connect Devices” screen to look for the settings I needed:
Then on Reclaim Cloud, I went to the addons menu under the Ghost server node in Reclaim Cloud, then I clicked Configure under Mail Setup:
I then filled in the details. Note that Ghost has both a Service and Transport field that where you should enter “SMTP”
If you want to delete and re-setup your Ghost sites and use some of that info above, that would probably be the fastest way to get things working, but you can also manually edit these settings by editing the /root/ghost/.env file and in a terminal restarting the docker stack like this:
cd /root/ghost
docker-compose down
docker-compose up -d
