Configure Proxmox SMTP For Email Notifications

Introduction

Having your Proxmox server send you notifications via email when things go wrong, such as backups failing can really save your butt. It used to be that one would have to configure sendmail on the host itself through the CLI, but now one can easily configure Proxmox to send emails via SMTP just through the web UI, which this tutorial will show you how to do.

Related Posts

• Set Root User's Email Address

Steps

Click on Datacenter (1), then scroll down and select Notifications (2), before then clicking the Add button and selecting SMTP (3).

Fill in the SMTP details in the dialogue box that appears. This is pretty self-explanatory.

If you are using Mailcow with email aliases, you need to use the "real" email inbox address for authentication, rather than the alias. You can (and should) combine this with "app passwords" which should work for the password field. You only use the alias email address for the From Address field.

Now it would be good to test that this works, but before you do so, make sure that you have set the root user's email address in Proxmox, before then clicking the SMTP entry you just created (1), and then clicking Test (2). You should have received a test email if all is working.

Configure Notifications To Use SMTP

The previous steps just configured Proxmox with the ability to send notifications by SMTP, but does not actually tell it to do so. To tell it how it should send notifications, we need to update the Notification Matchers.

It would probably be a good idea to disable the default mail-to-root (1), which relies on sendmail within the host. Then you probably want to update the default matcher by clicking on it (2), and then clicking Modify (3).

Clickon the Targets to notify (1) tab, before then disabling the mail to root and enabling the SMTP target you created earlier (2).

Extra Info - Backup Notifications

It is worth noting that for backups you will receive email notifications for manually taken backups, and scheduled backup jobs that you configure in Datacenter > Backups, as long as the Notification mode is set to any value other than legacy (the default is Auto, which will mean you get notifications).