Configuring SMTP

How to configure a custom SMTP server on your self-hosted Cobrowse.io instance for sending magic link login emails via your company email.

Cobrowse supports configuring a custom SMTP server to replace the default email provider. This will allow you to use your company email to send the magic link login emails.

Configuring SMTP

To configure the SMTP server using the Admin interface follow these steps:

1. Firstly make sure you have configured at least one superuser in your instance.

2. Open /admin/configuration on your instance while logged in as a superuser. e.g. https://example.com/admin/configuration

3. Enter a new configuration key called "smtp_url". The value should be the URL of your SMTP server including any authentication or non-standard ports.

The SMTP server can also be configured by setting a "smtp_url" environment variable on the API service of your deployment.

Configure from-address

Please use the username part of the SMTP URL to change the email address seen as the sender of the email. The username should be the full email address you wish to use but it must be an address the SMTP server can send from.

smtps://[e-mail]@smtp.example.com

Example SMTP URLs

A standard SMTP URL has the format smtps://username:[e-mail]

If your mail server does not require authentication, you can omit the username:password fields, e.g.smtps://smtp.example.com

If your mail server does not require a TLS connection, use can use the smtp:// protocol in the URL instead, e.g. smtp://smtp.example.com

If your mail server uses a non-standard port you can specify that via the URL, e.g. smtp://smtp.example.com:12345

Troubleshooting

During debugging it can be useful to increase console messages and reduce impacting factors.

We only recommend adding these query parameters when debugging in a test environment. We do not recommend adding any of these to your production SMTP URL.

Additional logging

To increase the log level add the debug and logger query parameters to your SMTP URL.

smtps://example.com?debug=true&logger=true

Disable TLS validation

It may be useful to remove any TLS validation during debugging to understand where the problem might be. To do this you can add the rejectUnauthorized query parameter with the value of false and append port number 25 to the end of the URL.

smtp://example.com:25?tls.rejectUnauthorized=false