Like I disclosed in the last post, am running this Ghost blog on PikaPods, installation & setup went smooth. But I had omitted setting up mail settings then as I didn't had any plans setting up membership on my blog. But, because Ghost only allows members to add comments, in order to allow comments, I actually forced to setup mail there.

I was first moving towards MailGun, as Ghost itself promoting their service, but then I stumbled upon a post on Ghost forum where they share a method to setup Gmail as SMTP for Ghost, for free as well 😍

The setup is easy, let me break it to simple steps:

Step 1

  • Go to https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords and login to your Google account you wish to use.
  • In the new page, you can see a input field where it ask you to enter App name, add SMTP as your app name there.
Gmail SMTP
  • Press Create button, and you will get a 16 digit password, save it somewhere confidentially (you will not be able to view it later)

That's it here.

Step 2

Now login to PikaPods.

Go to My Pods, on the Pod you want to make changes, click on the Settings icon.

A new popup will pop, in that select the ENV VARS tab.

There you can see a lot of fields to be filled, don't panic, it's pretty simple, let me help you on this.

Fill each fields like this:

  • mail__transport: SMTP
  • mail__from: Your Name <youremail@gmail.com>
  • mail__options__service: Google
  • mail__options__host: smtp.gmail.com 
  • mail__options__port: 587 or 465 (depends on below option)
  • mail__options__secure: false (or true when using port 465)
  • mail__options__auth__user: youremail@gmail.com (your Gmail email address)
  • mail__options__auth__pass: The password you have saved in the first step (App password for SMTP - without spaces)
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PikaPods also has a nice documentation on this, check it out at https://docs.pikapods.com/apps/ghost

That's it, now save your settings, Pod will reload, and from now on, your visitors will be able to sign up to your blog 😎

You could test it with one of your email address to verify everything is working correctly.

Stuck somewhere? Feel free to add your queries via comments, I will try my best to help you.