Hey all I have no idea what I’m doing here trying to set up a Lemmy instance. I’ve made simple servers before but nothing like the setup needed for this especially surrounding email verification.

I’m like 10 tutorials deep and on day 3 of trying to figure out what is going on with Postfix. There are so many words and acronyms being thrown around I don’t even know what I’m looking at anymore let alone knowing what the right questions to ask would be.

Very likely I’m going to nuke my droplet this weekend to make sure I have a fresh start with no half-baked solutions competing with each other. Would someone be willing to set up a time with me this weekend on Discord or something and baby step me through how to get this thing up and running?

  • rglullisAEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Are you doing this as an exercise or are you doing this because you just want your own instance?

    If the latter, why not use a managed hosting provider so that you don’t have to worry about any of that?

    • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.mlOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      Historically I make my own things because I like knowing how stuff works (or at least kinda knowing how it works). I’m a programmer but generally I’m on the like C++/C# game programming side of things and learning server stuff is very difficult for me. Always out to learn more though

  • poVoq@slrpnk.net
    0·
    1 year ago

    Just use an external SMTP provider. You will have a bad time with sending emails otherwise.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.net
        1·
        1 year ago

        Any email provider will do. I think you can even enable it for gmail accounts. You can just put in the connection details in the lemmy.hjson.

      • potato@lolimbeer.com
        1·
        1 year ago

        If you’re standing something up for yourself, and it doesn’t have to be anything fancy, any email provider that provides SMTP *will work.

        This even includes gmail: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229?hl=en

        But, another thing to remember is that many hosting providers block the default ports by default. Many will open the port with a customer service ticket but others will only do it at a certain “tier” of service.

        You mentioned a droplet so I googled digital ocean and smtp, and this thread popped up: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/sending-email-with-do-app-is-it-possible

        I, personally, use linode as my provider and I had to open a ticket with support in order to unblock the right ports to send email.

        As an aside:

        Standing up an email server itself is a good exercise because it’s an absolute PITA. Mainly due to trust and ensuring all your DNS records are right and stuff.

        Overall, it’s a nifty exercise to understand but I, personally, don’t really feel like it’s worth the pain.

        Edit: forgot to finish a sentence