Hi! I decided to experiment with my own instance. Went the docker route, and got everything working, except mail.

I setup postfix, and I can send mail to yahoo from the cli, however neither localhost:25 or actual.fqdm:25 work from the running lemmy_lemmy_1 container. The error is:

• FQDM: email_send_failed: Connection error: Connection refused (os error 111)
• localhost:25 email_send_failed: Connection error: Address not available (os error 99)

Has anyone seen this? Feels like a connectivity issue between the running container and host.

This is not letting me save an email address in my user settings.

I guess the intent is for people to use an external smtp service, rather than set up their own?

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UPDATE:

tldr; I got mail working with postfix running locally.

• I tried several “free” smtp relay services, and consistently got timeout errors.
• Out of frustration, I re-enabled my local postfix server and reconfigured Lemmy back to that.
• Tailing the postfix logs, I noticed it was rejecting the connection from the Lemmy instance with a relay not allowed error, which had an “internal IP of 192.x” (from the lemmyinternal network).
• So, I added that IP /32 to “mynetworks” on the host in /etc/postfix/main.cf, restarted postfix, and my instance can now send out emails. Yay!

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I’ll leave this post here in case anyone else runs into this problem.