I’ve been playing around with hosting my own Mastodon instance lately. If I continue this journey, I might write more about it. However, this post focuses solely on setting up email notifications between Amazon SES and Mastodon running within a Docker environment.

I had some trouble sending out emails successfully and it took a while to figure things out. With this post I just want to add to the confusion by providing my working configuration.

I have the following SMTP_ parameter in my .env file:

SMTP_AUTH_METHOD=plain
SMTP_ENABLE_STARTTLS=never
SMTP_ENABLE_STARTTLS_AUTO=false
SMTP_FROM_ADDRESS="Mastodon <[email protected]>"
SMTP_LOGIN=username
SMTP_PASSWORD=password
SMTP_OPENSSL_VERIFY_MODE=none
SMTP_PORT=465
SMTP_SERVER=email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
SMTP_TLS=true