Question

App to send email from Docker container?

I have a website that I’ve recently moved into Docker containers. The app needs to send emails. I have not deployed it on DigitalOcean yet.

I can’t seem to find any tutorials on here aside from setting up Postfix on the host. Can anyone recommend any good reading?

Thanks


Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Ryan Quinn
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
December 22, 2016
Accepted Answer

In this situation there are a few options to consider:

1.) As you mentioned, you could run postfix or another MTA on the host.

2.) You could choose from several existing mail server docker containers, map your ports and use that for processing messages

3.) You could use a transactional mail provider like SendGrid or MailGun to send messages. Personally I choose to use this option as most providers have a free tier and it takes the work of maintaining email services off my shoulders.

4.) You could run a separate server as a mail server which could serve several hosts running docker containers.

Hmm… #2 is a good point. I didn’t even think to look for one of those. [face-palm]

That being said, I think I will end up taking the mail provider option. Unless I missed something SendGrid is only free if you’re hosting your app on Google’s AppEngine, but MailGun is definitely looking like a good option.

Thanks, Ryan!

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel