Google Workspace SMTP relay without authentication

[dodedodo]

Hi!

Could you help me configure padloc smtp for google-workspace smtp relay without user authentication?

I'm trying to self-host padloc with docker, but I'm stuck on configuring the SMTP server. Upon first sign-up I get the generic error

I cannot find any errors or logs besides (node:58) [DEP0066] DeprecationWarning: OutgoingMessage.prototype._headers is deprecated

I'm trying to use google workspace as smtp relay. It's configured so that authentication isn't required, but instead the sending IP is checked.

What I think is the problem
I'm not quite sure, but I suspect this is where things go wrong. Looking at this line it looks like user/pass authentication is used when they're both not false.

What i've tried
By omitting the PL_EMAIL_SMTP_USER and PL_EMAIL_SMTP_PASSWORD env variables from docker-compose, it seems padloc sets them to an empty string (according to the docker stdout server started with config: {...}).

While PL_EMAIL_SMTP_USER=false seems to be interpreted as the string "false" (according to the docker stdout server started with config: {...})

Here's an excerpt of my configuration

...
services:
    server:
        image: padloc/server
        environment:
            PL_DATA_BACKEND: leveldb
            PL_DATA_LEVELDB_DIR: /data
            PL_DATA_ATTACHMENTS_BACKEND: fs
            PL_DATA_ATTACHMENTS_DIR: /attachments
            PL_SERVER_CLIENT_URL: [redacted]
            PL_EMAIL_BACKEND: smtp
            PL_EMAIL_SMTP_HOST: smtp-relay.gmail.com
            PL_EMAIL_SMTP_PORT: 587
            PL_EMAIL_SMTP_IGNORE_TLS: true
            PL_EMAIL_SMTP_SECURE: true
            PL_EMAIL_SMTP_USER:
            PL_EMAIL_SMTP_PASSWORD:
            PL_EMAIL_SMTP_FROM: no-reply@[redacted]
...

[dodedodo]

I've just checked, the authentication thing isn't true. auth is properly set to null when username and password are left blank. It's just the server started with config: {...} that's printing not completely correct data.

[MaKleSoft]

I would strongly advice against using smtp without authentication, but if you really want to, one thing that you can try is setting PL_EMAIL_SMTP_SECURE=false. Other than that, I can't really tell you what the correct SMTP settings are since that depends on the target server. If you'd take a closer look at what the individual SMTP settings mean and maybe find hints on how to find the correct values, I recommend checking out the Nodemailer docs (that's what Padloc is using under the hood): https://nodemailer.com/smtp/

[dodedodo]

Thanks for your reply! Google workspace can be configured to allow sending only from certain authorized IP addresses, so this environment isn't completely without authentication.

After some fiddling around with an isolated nodemailer environment, it turns out my issue is solved by these two changes:

1. Manually set the padloc docker container hostname to something gmail can resolve to the authorized IP address. E.g. the servers' fqdn.
2. Set secure: false and ignoreTLS: false. I had mistaken the latter as 'ignore certificate validity', but this setting will actually prevent nodemailer from negotiating STARTTLS.