Configure SMTP for outbound emails

To configure outbound email, follow these steps:

• Log in to the application as an administrator.
• Select the “System” menu (cog icon) in the left sidebar.
• In the resulting sub-menu, select the “Settings” menu item.
• Locate your store in the resulting list, then click the pencil icon to edit it.
• On the resulting page, select the “Mail” tab.
• Enter details for the SMTP server to be used for outbound email. For example, to configure a Gmail account, you could use the settings below. Replace USERNAME and PASSWORD with your Gmail account username and password respectively.
  • Mail Protocol - SMTP
  • Mail Parameters - Your email address with “-f” in front of it (such as -fUSERNAME@gmail.com)
  • SMTP Hostname - ssl://smtp.gmail.com
  • SMTP Username - USERNAME@gmail.com
  • SMTP Password - PASSWORD
  • SMTP Port - 465
  • SMTP Timeout - timeout for sending email
• Click the “Save” icon to save the new mail settings.

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.