Question

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?


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KFSys
Site Moderator
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December 11, 2021
Accepted Answer

Hi @AbdulH,

My guess would be that you are still sending messages out successfully but e-mail provider is rejecting them.

I know you mentioned you followed a tutorial, I’ll suggest this one :

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-configure-postfix-as-a-send-only-smtp-server-on-ubuntu-20-04

Additionally, another good suggestion would be to use a third-party e-mail provider which can be configured on your website to be used as SMTP host which is quite good. There are a lot of free ones which are good.

As for the password, I’ll recommend you to check out the wp-cli tool. It can help you with managing your WordPress installation from your Command-Line. You can check it out here :

https://wp-cli.org/

Hope this helps.

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