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zulip/docs/prod-email.md

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Outgoing email

This page documents everything you need to know about setting up outgoing email in a Zulip production environment. It's pretty simple if you already have an outgoing SMTP provider; just start reading from the configuration section.

Free outgoing email services

For sending outgoing email from your Zulip server, we highly recommend using a "transactional email" service like Mailgun or for AWS users, Amazon SES. These services are designed to send email from servers, and are by far the easiest way to get outgoing email working reliably.

If you don't have an existing outgoing SMTP provider, don't worry! Both of the options we recommend above (as well as dozens of other services) have free options; we recommend Mailgun as the easiest to get setup with. Once you've signed up, you'll want to find the service's provided "SMTP credentials", and configure Zulip as follows:

  • The hostname as EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.mailgun.org' in /etc/zulip/settings.py
  • The username as EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'username@example.com in /etc/zulip/settings.py.
  • The password as email_password = abcd1234 in /etc/zulip/zulip-secrets.conf.

Using Gmail for outgoing email

We don't recommend using an inbox product like Gmail for outgoing email, because Gmail's anti-spam measures make this annoying. But if you want to use a Gmail account to send outgoing email anyway, here's how to make it work:

  • Create a totally new Gmail account for your Zulip server; you don't want Zulip's automated emails to come from your personal email address.
  • If you're using 2-factor authentication on the Gmail account, you'll need to use an app-specific password.
  • If you're not using 2-factor authentication, read this Google support answer and configure that account as "less secure"; Gmail doesn't allow servers to send outgoing email by default.
  • Note also that the rate limits for Gmail are also quite low (e.g. 100 / day), so it's easy to get rate-limited if your server has significant traffic. For more active servers, we recommend moving to a free account from a transaction email service.

Logging outgoing email to a file for prototyping

If for prototyping, you don't want to bother setting up an email provider, you can add to /etc/zulip/settings.py the following:

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.filebased.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_FILE_PATH = '/var/log/zulip/emails'

Outgoing emails that Zulip would have sent will just be written to files in /var/log/zulip/emails/. This is enough to get you through initial user registration without an SMTP provider.

Remember to delete this configuration and restart the server if you later setup a real SMTP provider!

Configuration

To configure outgoing SMTP, you will need to complete the following steps:

  1. Fill out the outgoing email sending configuration block in /etc/zulip/settings.py, including EMAIL_HOST, and EMAIL_HOST_USER. You may also need to set EMAIL_PORT if your provider doesn't use the standard SMTP submission port (587).

  2. Put the SMTP password for EMAIL_HOST_USER in /etc/zulip/zulip-secrets.conf as email_password = yourPassword.

Testing and troubleshooting

You can quickly test your outgoing email configuration using:

su zulip
/home/zulip/deployments/current/manage.py send_test_email username@example.com

If it doesn't throw an error, it probably worked; you can confirm by checking your email.

It's important to test, because outgoing email often doesn't work the first time. Common causes of failures are:

  • Your hosting provider blocking outgoing SMTP traffic in its default firewall rules. Check whether EMAIL_PORT is blocked in your hosting provider's firewall.
  • Forgetting to put the password in /etc/zulip/zulip-secrets.conf.
  • Typos in transcribing the username or password.

Once you have it working from the management command, remember to restart your Zulip server using /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/restart-server so that the running server is using the latest configuration.

Advanced troubleshooting

Here are a few final notes on what to look at when debugging why you aren't receiving emails from Zulip:

  • Most transactional email services have an "outgoing email" log where you can inspect the emails that reached the service, whether it was flagged as spam, etc.
  • Starting with Zulip 1.7, Zulip logs an entry in /var/log/zulip/send_email.log whenever it attempts to send an email, including whether the request succeeded or failed.
  • If attempting to send an email throws an exception, a traceback should be in /var/log/zulip/errors.log, along with any other exceptions Zulip encounters.
  • Zulip's email sending configuration is based on the standard Django SMTP backend configuration. So if you're having trouble getting your email provider working, you may want to search for documentation related to using your email provider with Django. The one thing we've changed from the defaults is reading the email password from the email_password entry in the Zulip secrets file, as part of our policy of not having any secret information in the /etc/zulip/settings.py file. In other words, if Django documentation references setting EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD, you should instead set email_password in /etc/zulip/zulip-secrets.conf.