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Setting up Email for Alerts

To receive emails from your Ridgeback installation, the Policy and Server containers need to be configured to send emails.

The .env file in your Ridgeback folder is where you add variables to pass into the containers, including your email server information. You can also input your email server details on the install.html page, which will populate your .env file.

Enabling App Passwords

For both Google and Microsoft, you'll need to enable two-step verification before you can create an App Password. The option to create an App Password won't appear until two-step verification is active.

For Gmail

If you use Gmail, set up an App Password here

specifically for Ridgeback, and use it as your password. When entering the Google App Password, make sure to remove any spaces.

Gmail SMTP Settings:

  • EmailServerHost: smtp-relay.gmail.com
  • EmailServerPort: 587
  • EmailServerUsername: the email for which the app password was created
  • EmailServerPassword: the app password (without spaces)
  • EmailFrom: yourEmail+Ridgeback@yourdomain.com

Tip: Gmail allows you to append extra information to your email by using a +, making it easy to identify emails from your Ridgeback setup.

For Office365

If you use Office365, The place to create an App Password is here Or you can follow these steps to create an App Password:

  1. Sign in to your Office365 account.
  2. Go to the My Account page.
  3. Select Security.
  4. Choose Manage How I Sign In.
  5. Scroll down to App Password and click Create a New App Password.
  6. Highlight and Copy the app password it created for you.
  7. Paste this password into the EmailServerPassword field in the form or .env file.

Office365 SMTP Settings:

  • EmailServerHost: smtp.office365.com
  • EmailServerPort: 587
  • EmailServerUsername: the email for which the app password was created
  • EmailServerPassword: the app password
  • EmailFrom: the email for which the app password was created

Checking and Troubleshooting

To see what is happening when the Ridgeback tries to send an email, you can send yourself a password reset email from the login page and view the docker desktop log for the server container to see if it has any errors. If there were no errors in the server container log, and you don't see the email, check your spam folder.

When you do get the email, you don'y need to actually change your password unless you have forgotten it. You can simply delete the email and have confidence that emails will get sent.

Steps needed after ANY change to the .env file If you are setting up email by editing the .env file, not from the form fields in the install.html, then you will need to remove and rebuild the containers that use the changed variables.

Currently, this is the server and policy containers.

The steps to do this are:

  1. open a command or terminal window
  2. navigate to the Ridgeback folder: windows: cd \program files\Ridgeback\ linux: cd ~/ridgeback/
  3. stop and remove the containers: docker compose rm -sf policy server
  4. rebuild and run the containers: docker compose up -d policy server and you are done!