Configure SMTP for outbound emails

To configure SMTP settings using an external SMTP server, you have to add the lines indicated below to the Discourse /opt/bitnami/discourse/config/discourse.conf configuration file.

smtp_address = "SMTP_HOSTNAME"
smtp_port = SMTP_PORT
smtp_domain = example.com
smtp_user_name = 'SMTP_USER'
smtp_password = 'SMTP_PASSWORD'
smtp_enable_start_tls = true

Restart the servers:

$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart

SMTP configuration for Gmail

Warning: If you use Discourse extensively, we recommend to use your own SMTP server for sending emails. The current Gmail sending limit is 500 emails per 24 hours.

An example for Gmail is as follows. Replace USERNAME and PASSWORD with your Gmail account username and password respectively.

smtp_address = "smtp.gmail.com"
smtp_port = 587
smtp_domain = example.com
smtp_user_name = 'USERNAME@gmail.com'
smtp_password = 'PASSWORD'
smtp_enable_start_tls = true
smtp_authentication = login

To configure the application to use the SMTP service provided by Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), refer to the guide on using Amazon SES.

NOTE: Amazon EC2 blocks SMTP port 25 by default on all Amazon EC2 instances, and you must manually request removal of this restriction to use this port.

To configure the application to use other third-party SMTP services for outgoing email, such as SendGrid, refer to the FAQ.

NOTE: If you are using Gmail as the outbound email server, your application’s attempts to send outgoing emails may be blocked by Gmail if it considers the authentication attempts to be suspicious. When this happens, you will receive a Gmail security alert at the corresponding Gmail address. To proceed, you will need to manually confirm the validity of the authentication attempt before Gmail will permit the application to send outbound emails. For more information on this and other Gmail issues related to outbound email from your application, refer to our Gmail SMTP troubleshooting page.