How to forward email from my wordpress droplet

Initially when I created my wordpress droplet, I could click on reset password and I would receive an email within my gmail account which is configured as admin, this was without any email configuration on my part.

At some point I started strangely receiving emails that someone is triggering reset password to my wordpress account and when I subsequently would try and login I would find my password no longer worked so I would need to reset it. This is somewhat suspicious hence I’m thinking of adding 2 factor authentication to make my wordpress account more secure.

Unfortunately on the latest automatic triggered change of my password, I can no longer receive emails to my gmail account hence I can no longer login to my wordpress account. I’ve tried setting up postfix and configuring sendmail via /etc/hosts with my domain though no luck, within /var/log/mail.log I can see Service Unavailable errors which is a generic error.

I’m trying to avoid having to set up an email server, I just want to utilise the default functionality of the droplet as it had initially forwarded email though at some point regressed, maybe when I rebooted the droplet from the dashboard.

Does anyone have any thoughts on my email issues?