MyBB Community Forums

Hello All,

Here it's 2:50AM, and I went down a deep rabbit hole tonight with email validation for accounts on my MyBB forum.  In sum:

1. MyBB is installed on an Azure VM running Ubuntu 20.04, served by Apache2
2. For users to create an account, email validation is required
3. To send an email, SMTP mail must be set up on my server. No problem--installed postfix.
4. Problem: Azure blocks port 25 by default(!)
- Good reason for this: they don't want someone signing up for a free VM and spamming millions of emails out.
- I have no intention of spamming; I merely want to validate users.
5. So, users never receive their verification (or any other) mail, so they can't sign up!
6. Microsoft Azure is recommending "Sendgrid" [2] or the like for Authenticated SMTP relay servics. [1]
- This seems a bit overkill

Did I make a wrong turn somewhere? Do I need to pay for a more expensive Azure VM that allows traffic on port 25? Should I set up authenticated SMTP services? Any recommendation for how I should deal with this? 

I was tempted to turn on "Instant Access," but the last time I did this, I got almost 100,000 spam messages, which almost crashed my server. So I set it on manual/admin approval for now.

If anyone cares here is the BB. We shall have Freedom of Speech and Expression!

https://forum.frexpy.org/

Thanks,
Keith

1. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/v...nnectivity
2. https://sendgrid.com/

It would typically be easier to use an SMTP service like Sendgrid or Mailgun or any other 3rd party SMTP provider that set up and maintain your own mail server. Most of them are free for low usage, and you just need to populate the SMTP credentials and it'll work. I'd say doing that is a lot simpler and efficient than paying for a more expensive server or settings things up yourself.

(2022-09-02, 10:57 AM)Matt Wrote: [ -> ]It would typically be easier to use an SMTP service like Sendgrid or Mailgun or any other 3rd party SMTP provider that set up and maintain your own mail server. Most of them are free for low usage, and you just need to populate the SMTP credentials and it'll work. I'd say doing that is a lot simpler and efficient than paying for a more expensive server or settings things up yourself.

So there's no way to hack around this business of closing port 25?

Is this what people who run MyBB in the cloud are doing?

The other option is to upgrade my VM within Azure, which makes it eligible for port 25 to be opened... but this co$ts...

I might also try to file a support request, and beg them to open 25, explaining that I'm not going to spam... I need it to validate my forum users.

Thanks for the response.

It's not really something we can know, it's infrastructure-specific. If the port on the server to send email is closed then you can't send email. Typically sending email from the web server is a bad idea and it's pretty standard to use SMTP services. Server mail will almost never work on shared hosting, and cloud hosting has the risk of sending spam, but can avoid it all by using a trusted SMTP service as they work with the email providers to make sure their emails get accepted. Having to keep your server out of email blacklists and maintaining the mail queue etc will be more hassle than it's worth. Sendgrid is free for 100 emails a day, Mailgun is free for 5000 a month. Just need to add some DNS entries, set the SMTP credentials, and you'll be good to go.

(2022-09-02, 04:35 PM)Matt Wrote: [ -> ]It's not really something we can know, it's infrastructure-specific. If the port on the server to send email is closed then you can't send email. Typically sending email from the web server is a bad idea and it's pretty standard to use SMTP services. Server mail will almost never work on shared hosting, and cloud hosting has the risk of sending spam, but can avoid it all by using a trusted SMTP service as they work with the email providers to make sure their emails get accepted. Having to keep your server out of email blacklists and maintaining the mail queue etc will be more hassle than it's worth. Sendgrid is free for 100 emails a day, Mailgun is free for 5000 a month. Just need to add some DNS entries, set the SMTP credentials, and you'll be good to go.

Thank you for your responses. I'll give one of those SMTP services a try.