How to setup email for Discourse Forum with Google Apps SMTP-relay right way?

Sometime back we announce a new forum software for Crunchify readers and for our client. It’s still under construction and should be available for all users may be in couple of days. As you know Discourse is very popular forum software among all latest tech companies, we thought of giving a try. Also, it’s open source.

Discourse forum basic setup went perfectly fine. It was simple. I used Linode as our hosting service provider for our client. Linode comes with special Ubuntu 14.04 LTS image which was straight forward.

Once you install and setup Discourse on Linode, it’s very important to have email service setup correctly. To be honest, it took me long time to figure out how to setup Google App’s SMTP relay correct way in setting file discourse.conf.

In this tutorial we will go over detailed steps on how to setup email service correct way if you are google App users. If you have any of below questions also then you are at right place.

• Troubleshooting email on a new Discourse install
• How do I change my SMTP settings (Discourse Docker Install)
• Emails with local SMTP
• How to edit e-mail settings for Discourse?
• How To Install Discourse on Ubuntu 14.04
• Can’t send mail with gmail SMTP server (in discourse)
• How to setup Google App SMTP relay service?

Step-1

Login to Google Admin Console

Step-2

1. Go to Apps
2. Google Apps
3. Setting for Gmail
4. Advance Settings
5. Search with text relay

Step-3

1. Mouse hover and click on configure
2. Provide all details as you see in below image
   • Select Only addresses in my domains
   • Click check box for Only accept mail from the specified IP address
   • Provide your droplet/host IP address
   • Click check box for Required TLS encryption
3. Click on Save button to save settings

Step-4

1. Login to your host/droplet
2. Open discourse.conf file
3. Add below settings for email service
   • NOTE: keep username and password field empty

DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS: 'contact@crunchify.com'

  ## TODO: The domain name this Discourse instance will respond to
  DISCOURSE_HOSTNAME: 'ask.crunchify.com'

  ## TODO: The mailserver this Discourse instance will use
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_ADDRESS: smtp-relay.gmail.com      
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_PORT: 587                        
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_USER_NAME:    
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_PASSWORD:     
  #DISCOURSE_SMTP_ENABLE_START_TLS: true

Step-5

Save your setting and initialize /restart your discourse application. Your email service should be configured correct way now.

Enjoy and happy blogging.