Email notifications missing b default?

[Scar_UY]

I've been reading about proxmox for a couple of years and I've been trying it for a few months, I have 2 test installations (6.4 and 7.0) and once you get around the quirks and (to me) unintuitive way of doing things, it's quite nice!

I noticed my first server (6.4) has never sent me an email, but I thought maybe I forgot to input my email during setup so when I installed 7.0 I payed especial attention to this, set everything up, create a few containers, backups, and everything works just fine, except I never got an email, I've checked everything on the gui in both but I couldn't find any settings pertaining email.

So I went and checked the doccumentation (https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html) and maybe I'm just slow or tired, but I couldn't find any mention on how to set up any email settings whatsoever.

I use a lot of turnkey linux containers and VMs and they ask for your email on setup and later you get notifications, no settings required, so maybe this is what proxmox does and thus no settings are needed?

I find hard to believe that a manual - command line setup is needed, especially since this is already version 7 and email is maybe the most basic form of notification.

Could please anyone point me in the right direction on what am I doing wrong? Or is it that proxmox ships with no email notification by default and it needs to be set up manually? And if so, why isn't that detail in the documentation? (I appologize if it is and I couldn't find it)



Thank you all for your time.

 

[Dunuin]

You need to manually setup postfix as a SMTP relay using CLI. And that is really complicated and how to setup postfix heavily depends on what your SMTP server provider you use. Looks like all providers need other settings or they will just not accept to forward the mails. Took me hours to find out the correct options for my hosters SMTP server.

 

[Scar_UY]

You need to manually setup postfix as a SMTP relay using CLI. And that is really complicated and how to setup postfix heavily depends on what your SMTP server provider you use. Looks like all providers need other settings or they will just not accept to forward the mails. Took me hours to find out the correct options for my hosters SMTP server.

Thank you for your answer, I have more questions if you're so kind, does it have to be postfix? It is famous for being difficult to make it work if yo're not "fluent" with it, I'd prefer the much simpler and straight forwars msmtp.

In any case, I'll leave an open question, and no, I'm not trying to be "that guy" It's an honest question, mail notification is built-in in every project I've ever used (nextcloud, xigmanas, librenms and a long, long etc) you just put the server info in the gui, test it and off you go, does the proxmox team have a reason to consider simple mail notifications irrelevant or very low priority? If so, I'll really like to know about it, also, why is this subjet not even mentioned in the documentation?

 

[Dunuin]

Thank you for your answer, I have more questions if you're so kind, does it have to be postfix? It is famous for being difficult to make it work if yo're not "fluent" with it, I'd prefer the much simpler and straight forwars msmtp.

I think you can use what you want as long as you got a mail server running on your host.

 

[rjkbj]

Thank you for your answer, I have more questions if you're so kind, does it have to be postfix? It is famous for being difficult to make it work if yo're not "fluent" with it, I'd prefer the much simpler and straight forwars msmtp.

In any case, I'll leave an open question, and no, I'm not trying to be "that guy" It's an honest question, mail notification is built-in in every project I've ever used (nextcloud, xigmanas, librenms and a long, long etc) you just put the server info in the gui, test it and off you go, does the proxmox team have a reason to consider simple mail notifications irrelevant or very low priority? If so, I'll really like to know about it, also, why is this subjet not even mentioned in the documentation?

You're not wrong. As mature as Proxmox is, there really is no reason there cant be a function to enter email server credentials in the UI for notifications. Most open source big boys have this basic feature (pfSense, OPNsense, TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault; even cheap IPMI firmware has it built right in.). It's really not that hard to install the dependencies and configure postfix through the cli, but more and more people want to try Proxmox as it matures and becomes more user friendly with GUI functionality. Adding this feature would surly help alleviate user frustration and prevent most people from having to do multiple forum searches to get the correct procedures for implementation.