Lemmy Support

If email isn't working, then you'll have to turn off email verification in your instance's settings before anyone is able to log in without encountering that spinner.

To get email to work, you'll need to provide SMTP credentials in lemmy.hjson on the server you're using to host lemmy. An example SMTP configuration is shown in the docs here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/configuration.html

You may also have to restart lemmy after you update the configuration. (I do this on my server via docker-compose restart.)

When I set up lemmy on my server with lemmy-ansible, the config file was initially set up with a valid-looking SMTP config. But when emails weren't working I looked more closely, and it turned out that there is something broken with the SMTP service that lemmy is integrated with by default. It seems that you will need to provide your own credentials.

I'm using an SMTP service provided by a web hosting service I pay for, but you can also use gmail in a pinch: https://kinsta.com/blog/gmail-smtp-server/

How did you set up Lemmy? If you used Docker, you can get them from docker logs. For a native install, I'm unclear on where the logs get written or if they go through syslog; perhaps someone else can chime in.

If you're using docker, try this:

Enter your Lemmy directory and run:

docker-compose logs --tail=10 -f lemmy

where lemmy is the name of the container running the lemmy backend (not the ui). With the logs tail-ing, try your registration process and look for any errors.

The logs are fairly easy to parse visually, which is nice because there are quite a few backend errors that do not pop up in the UI. Keeping the logs tail-ing for the first day or so was really helpful in getting my instance up and running.

For what it's worth, I've got email verification set up and working on my instance. I had some issues at first, but I had two problems, both of which gave me endless spinners in the UI:

1. At first, I forgot to add the email settings to lemmy's config.hjson file (d'oh!)
2. I was using the SSL port for my SMTP server but forgot to set the tls_type to tls.

If the backend has any issue connecting to the email server, it should show up in the logs.

You're probably best off submitting an issue on github, but note that depending on how you have SMTP configured and how you're sending mail- you may be having issues with your hosting provider, mine blocks the SMTP ports. I'm currently working to get mail set up, but its very difficult. I'll keep you posted.