Sending email from your app

Most self-hosted apps need email before they are usable. A forum sends invitations, a helpdesk sends replies, and almost everything sends password resets. Without it you can find yourself locked out of your own app.

You do not need a third-party mail provider. Every app can send through our mail relay.

Switch it on

1. Open your app and go to the Mail tab.
2. Choose Create credential.
3. Copy the details shown. The password appears once and is never shown again.
4. Paste them into your app's own mail settings. Most apps ask for the same five things:

Setting	Value
SMTP host	smtp.cnpods.com
Port	587
Encryption	STARTTLS (sometimes shown as "TLS", not "SSL")
Username	the credential username from the Mail tab
Password	the credential password from the Mail tab
From address	the address shown on the Mail tab

Some apps read these from the Environment tab instead of a settings page. Ghost, for example, uses mail__options__host, mail__options__auth__user and so on. The app's first-run notes in the panel say which applies.

Restart the app if it does not pick the settings up straight away.

The From address is fixed

Your app may only send from the address shown on the Mail tab. Anything else is rejected.

That is deliberate. It stops one customer sending mail that appears to come from another, or from us. If your app lets you set a "from" address, set it to exactly the address on the Mail tab.

You can put your own name on it — My Forum <yourapp@send.cnpods.com> is fine. It is the address in the angle brackets that has to match.

How much you can send

Every app includes 1,000 emails a month, with shorter limits of 100 a day and 20 an hour to catch a misbehaving app before it empties your allowance.

That comfortably covers sign-in links, password resets and notifications, which is what this is for. The Mail tab shows exactly where you are against each limit.

If you genuinely need more, open a ticket and tell us roughly how much and what for. We can raise it.

What this is not for

Newsletters and marketing campaigns are not carried. This is transactional email only — messages sent to one person because of something they just did.

Apps built for bulk sending, such as Listmonk or Mautic, are not offered a credential at all. They still work; you supply your own bulk email provider in the app's settings.

This is not us being awkward. Bulk sending shares a reputation with every other customer's mail, and one imported mailing list would put everyone's password resets in spam folders.

If mail is not arriving

• Check the Mail tab first. If the credential is suspended, the reason is shown there.
• Check your allowance. If you have hit a limit, the meters will show it.
• Check the address. Sending from anything other than the address shown is rejected.
• Check the app's own log on the Logs tab — most apps record the SMTP error verbatim.

If none of that explains it, open a ticket with the app name and roughly when you tried. We can see what the relay did with the message.