Can't find a clear and simple way to make Hestia work with a smtp relay

lgromb · January 16, 2025, 9:21am

We’ve moved from ISPConfig to Hestia some weeks ago.

We’d like to have a similar way to work with outbound emails sent by websites (such as a password reset from Wordpress for exemple), to be directly forwarded to our SMTP relay which is hosted on a SaaS.

The way it worked with ISP and postfix was that postfix listened on 127.0.0.1:25 and forwarded every mail sent to it to our SMTP relay. This way, we could tell our clients to directly use “127.0.0.1” and port 25 as the SMTP server to be sure that all mail would be forwarded to the SMTP relay.

We can’t find such a mechanism in Hestia. We’ve followed the documentation on mailing, and configured Exim4 as described (we do have a /etc/exim4/smtp_relay.conf file, containing our SMTP relay host. There’s no auth on the SMTP relay, but IP whitelisting, so it’s only a host and port 25).

Mail sent by Hestia (using sendmail), seems to work because hestia uses sendmail, but not every client is able to use sendmail, they sometime only have the possibility to enter a host and port.

Can someone guide us on that matter ?

Concerning sent mail using sendmail, we’re not able to see logs relative to sent mail, did we miss an option ?

Thanks for the help,

eris · January 16, 2025, 11:21am

github.com

hestiacp/hestiacp/blob/main/bin/v-add-sys-smtp-relay

#!/bin/bash
# info: add system wide smtp relay support
# options: HOST [USERNAME] [PASSWORD] [PORT]
#
# example: v-add-sys-smtp-relay srv.smtprelay.tld uname123 pass12345
#
# This function adds system wide smtp relay support.

#----------------------------------------------------------#
#                Variables & Functions                     #
#----------------------------------------------------------#

# Argument definition
host=$1
username=$2
password=$3
port=${4-587}

# Includes
# shellcheck source=/etc/hestiacp/hestia.conf

This file has been truncated. show original

Just run this command and it should work fine…

v-add-smtp-relay "host" "" "" "25"

lgromb · January 16, 2025, 12:41pm

Okay for the record what @eris gave was what we tried first, and didn’t seem to work.

But it worked in the end, let me explain.

We do provision our host using ansible and a predefined set of software, postfix being a part of that set, and being installed onto those hosts.

For some kind of reason, this playbook happened after the hestia setup, and installing postfix, uninstalled exim4, leaving only the config files. So during my first post, we’ve been trying to send mail without a MTA active lol.

Reinstalling exim4 packages and purging postfix made the whole thing work, including sending mail to localhost:25. Thanks for the help

system · February 15, 2025, 12:41pm

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