Email (SMTP) setup

Email notifications go out through any SMTP server you configure — Postmark, Resend, SES, Mailgun, your own postfix, anything that speaks SMTP. This is an operator concern: hosted instances configure SMTP once for everyone. The per-user side (enabling email, sending a test email) lives in Notifications.

Configuration

Set these in the environment that runs OpenPlaud:

SMTP_HOST=smtp.example.com
SMTP_PORT=587                  # 465 if SMTP_SECURE=true, else 587
SMTP_SECURE=false              # true => implicit TLS on 465
SMTP_USER=apikey-or-username
SMTP_PASSWORD=secret
SMTP_FROM="OpenPlaud <[email protected]>"

SMTP_FROM accepts either a bare email ([email protected]) or a display-name form (Name <[email protected]>). The env loader rejects anything else.

See Environment variables for the full list of SMTP knobs and their defaults.

When SMTP is unset

When SMTP_HOST is unset, the email backend disables itself — calls into sendEmail() short-circuit and log a "SMTP not configured" warning. No silent failures, no swallowed exceptions, no half-working state. Users who enable email in Settings will see no errors in the UI, but no mail will be sent.

Verifying the configuration

Once SMTP is set, any user can verify it without waiting for a real event: Settings → Notifications → Email → Send test email. That button calls the /api/settings/test-email route, which exercises the full nodemailer + template-render path against your configured SMTP server.