openproject/help/installation-and-operations/configuration/outbound-emails/README.md

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[{title Configuring outbound emails} {priority 8}]

Configuring outbound emails

By default, both the docker and package-based installations will setup a postfix server to allow sending emails from your server. While it is a good starting point, it is not a recommended production setup since you will most likely run into delivery issues since your server will lack the trust of a proper email provider.

In this guide we will describe how to configure outbound emails using an external SMTP server.

Requirements

You will need to have SMTP settings ready. Those can eiher be from a company SMTP server, a GMail account, or a public provider such as SendGrid.

Taking SendGrid as an example, you would need to sign up on their website (they offer a free plan with up to 12000 emails per month), and once your account is provisioned, generate a new API key and copy it somewhere (it looks like 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). You could also simply use your SendGrid username and password, but this is less secure.

You can adjust those settings for other SMTP providers, such as GMail, Mandrill, etc. Please refer to the documentation of the corresponding provider to see what values should be used.

Package-based installation (DEB/RPM)

If you installed OpenProject with the package-based installation, simply run sudo openproject reconfigure, and when the email wizard is displayed, select the SMTP option and fill in the required details (cf the initial configuration section)

Docker installation

If you installed OpenProject with Docker, here is how you would enable outbound emails through the use of the SMTP environment variables (with SendGrid, the SMTP_USER_NAME is always apikey. Just replace SMTP_PASSWORD with the API key you've generated and you should be good to go):

docker run -d \
  -e EMAIL_DELIVERY_METHOD=smtp \
  -e SMTP_ADDRESS=smtp.sendgrid.net \
  -e SMTP_PORT=587 \
  -e SMTP_DOMAIN=my.domain.com \
  -e SMTP_AUTHENTICATION=login \
  -e SMTP_ENABLE_STARTTLS_AUTO=true \
  -e SMTP_USER_NAME="apikey" \
  -e SMTP_PASSWORD="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" \
  ...