Yunohost + Discourse: SMTP Woes

Are you self-hosting? Did you install Discourse? Does your ISP block port 25? Well. Here’s what you do if you’re using Yunohost for your server.

As a tech enthusiast, I recently tried doing just that. One challenge I faced was configuring SMTP email settings, which wasn’t documented well. After some experimentation, I found a solution and want to share it with other Yunohost users.

To configure SMTP in Discourse, locate the discourse.conf file at /var/www/discourse/config/discourse.conf. Update the SMTP settings, save, and restart Discourse using “systemctl restart discourse.” For example:

nano /var/www/discourse/config/discourse.conf 
systemctl restart discourse

If you’re using Office365, follow these steps to set up SMTP:

• Add your forum’s URL to Microsoft admin settings.
• Create an inbox using the subdomain.
• Assign an Exchange Online (Plan 1) license to the mailbox.
• Enable “Authenticated SMTP” in Azure portal.
• Disable MFA on the mailbox.
• Configure Discourse to use your Office365 mailbox with the following settings:

hostname = "forum.yourlinks.com" 
smtp_address = smtp.office365.com 
smtp_port = 587 
smtp_domain = forum.yourlinks.com 
smtp_user_name = noreply@forum.yourlinks.com 
smtp_password = YourLinksPassWordHere 
smtp_authentication = login 
smtp_enable_start_tls = true 
smtp_openssl_verify_mode = 
smtp_force_tls = false

With these tips, you should be able to configure SMTP in Discourse on Yunohost without the struggles I faced.