I used the Ansible playbook instructions and got my instance up and running, which is where I’m sending this from now. Still, I was not able to get the SMTP side of things working. Does this whole setup self-host SMTP on the Lemmy instance, or is it something I’ll have to sort out externally? I’ve heard some people have had issues with Digital Ocean on certain ports, which is the VPS provider I’m hosting on, but even other ports I’ve tried have not worked.
Afaik Digital Ocean blocks smtp port.
What you can do is to get some mail relay service, such as mailgun or any other and configure postfix to use it as a relay host. It can be done running postfix container, but probably Lemmy could be configured to send email via relay without using postfix
Yep. DigitalOcean specifically recommends SendGrid as an alternative: https://docs.digitalocean.com/support/why-is-smtp-blocked/
There was a post earlier on recommended SMTP services. One is having a deal for $5/year, 300 emails/hr rate mxroute