SMTP authentication failing

[clmcavaney]

Description

I am running Gitea as a docker container. In the past I have been able to use a SMTP server with authentication successfully. I have recently had to change SMTP providers and now am getting this error message when I am testing email:

Failed to send a testing email to "<redacted>": gomail: could not send email 1: failed to authenticate SMTP: 535 5.7.8 Error: authentication failed: authentication failure

I have looked into the debugs, but there are not many around the email process. I have also tried another go based CLI mail program (github.com/kiwimic/mailCLI) to see if the SMTP service is working with the same SMTP credentials as I have configured for Gitea. That CLI worked.

I also tested with the swaks CLI tool with the same SMTP credentials, and it worked too.

So, I am wondering why Gitea isn't working. Is there a way to get more debugging information out of Gitea? I have set the log level to DEBUG, but it isn't including things like what attributes it is passing to the SMTP service or anything like that. I am wondering if it is a string encoding issue or something that is causing the SMTP server to say authentication failure.

Any assistance would be fantastic - I'm happy to diagnose further, I am not as familiar with go as with other languages.

Gitea Version

1.20.0+dev-888-g64e0672e3

Can you reproduce the bug on the Gitea demo site?

No

Log Gist

No response

Screenshots

This is the only console log about the test email: gitea | 2023/05/24 15:41:13 ...eb/routing/logger.go:102:func1() [I] router: completed POST /admin/config/test_mail for []:0, 303 See Other in 2924.0ms @ admin/config.go:31(admin.SendTestMail)

Git Version

git version 2.40.1

Operating System

Docker container

How are you running Gitea?

Within a Docker container using the gitea/gitea:nightly release. I used nightly to see if the isn't had been resolved in the latest version. docker-compose.yml contains:

...
      - GITEA__mailer__PROTOCOL=smtp+starttls
      - GITEA__mailer__SMTP_PORT=587
      - GITEA__mailer__IS_TLS_ENABLED=true
      # shouldn't need this but giving it a try
      - GITEA__mailer__FORCE_TRUST_SERVER_CERT=false
      - GITEA__mailer__FROM=<redacted>
      - GITEA__mailer__USER=<redacted>
      - 'GITEA__mailer__SUBJECT_PREFIX=GITEA: '
      - GITEA__mailer__PASSWD=`<redacted>`
...

Database

MySQL

[wxiaoguang]

Can you manually check your "app.ini" to see whether the options are right there?

gitea.com is also using the nightly and it also sends emails, it works there.

[clmcavaney]

G'day @wxiaoguang, Thanks for the prompt response. I was able to check that and had found that the environment variables from the docker-compose.yml hadn't come through correctly. I have made some adjustments and I think it may be working now. I will update for sure once I can confirm.

[clmcavaney]

I can confirm that this is working.

From what I can determine the issue was twfold.

One, is that there is two configuration items for essentially the same thing: GITEA__mailer__HOST which is a combination of GITEA__mailer__SMTP_ADDR and GITEA__mailer__SMTP_PORT. If I only configure GITEA__mailer__HOST email fails to send. I have to configure both the HOST, SMTP_ADDR, and SMTP_PORT values.

Why is this?

I read the documentation as HOST would take priority over SMTP_ADDR and SMTP_PORT - but maybe it is the other way round.

I think the issue there could be that if SMTP_ADDR and SMTP_PORT is supplied, and HOST is not, any existing HOST value in the app.ini file isn't removed. (NOTE: There is an existing app.ini file as there is a persistent volume specified in the docker-compose.yml file.

Two, escaping the password value. Once I realised I was able to see the app.ini file in the Docker container, I was able to ascertain that the password had not been configured correctly.

Thanks again for your quick response @wxiaoguang