For a reason not clearly explained by DigitalOcean they started blocking ports 465 and 587 on 6th March Release Notes | DigitalOcean Documentation “SMTP ports 465 and 587 are now blocked on Droplets.” This affected a droplet that was instantiated over 2 years ago, and was previously working fine sending email.
However I definitely have droplets on DO which are able to send email using port 587, and I have also droplets which suddenly stopped being able to send.
I am absolutely appalled that DO would do this without any form of notification or warning. They tell me about planned LON1 maintenance about 5 times a week so I can’t see how they can’t let me know about a potentially breaking change to networking. I only found out that this droplet was not sending email becuase the customer contacted me to say there seems to be an issue, which is embarrassing and looks unprofessional. Suffice to say I will gradually be moving all my servers away from DO where possible. (I use a lot of Hetzner these days)
After what was, I’m afraid to say, a rather sharply worded email from me today, They unblocked the ports and everything is working now.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a way to ‘Uptime Monitor’ email sending? There are a few ways email can fail, and unless you are monitoring all the email from a forum it’s hard to always ‘notice’ that email is no longer going out.