Hello Discourse Support/Community, I have been struggling for several days to resolve an issue with outgoing emails from my Discourse instance. I am running Discourse in a Docker container on a Spaceship VPS (Phoenix, US). My mail provider is Spacemail (SMTP). Issue: Discourse cannot send email…

Yes, I followed the official Discourse installation guide for Docker. If you need, I can provide details about my setup or any adjustments I had to make for my VPS environment.

Error log details: When attempting to send emails from Discourse, I consistently receive a timeout error in the job logs: Job exception: Net::ReadTimeout net-protocol-0.2.2/lib/net/protocol.rb:229:in `rbuf_fill' net-protocol-0.2.2/lib/net/protocol.rb:199:in `readuntil' net-protocol-0.2.2/lib/net/p…

I am not familiar at all with that vps. If you are right at the beginning of your setup you can try starting over with a new server rather than continuing to hit your head against the wall. Maybe try a different provider if that still doesn’t work.

I Tried: Zap-Hosting Ultra-Host And now spaceship, where i have all of DNS Records, domain, mailbox.

Have you tried Troubleshoot email on a new Discourse install ? Sorry this has been such a struggle for you. Shouldn’t be so hard!

Yes, I did… Then I created the admin account via SSH command. After that, I saw the error: ‘Job exception: Net::ReadTimeout’

Summary of troubleshooting steps taken: Installed Discourse on a Spaceship VPS (Phoenix, US) using the official Docker install guide. Created the admin account via SSH command. Configured SMTP with Spacemail ( mail.spacemail.com , port 465, SSL, full email as username, correct password). R…

Try ports 587 or 2525 (try 587 first), do those work? 587 is the port mentioned in the install guide .

Thank you for your suggestion. My mailbox provider (Spacemail) officially supports only port 465 with SSL for SMTP. However, I have also tested port 587 with STARTTLS as part of troubleshooting (together with support), but the timeout issue still persists.

Persistent SMTP Timeout Issue with Spacemail on Discourse (VPS, Docker)

Support

tobiaseigen (Tobias Eigen) September 21, 2025, 5:59pm 2

Can you confirm you followed the official install?

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Persistent SMTP Timeout Issue with Spacemail on Discourse (VPS, Docker)

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