Email delivery

Send activation, invitation and password reset emails from a Kubernetes deployment.

The web service sends every email (activation, project invitations, password reset) from every Ayakaleaf Pro pod. The settings are the same as on the Toolkit, see Email delivery.

Service	web, in every Ayakaleaf Pro pod; read when web starts
Pod → outside	your SMTP server (OVERLEAF_EMAIL_SMTP_HOST), or the Amazon SES API of OVERLEAF_EMAIL_AWS_SES_REGION
State	the sending rate limit in Redis
Periodic jobs	none

Configuration

1. ConfigMap

   30-config.yaml (additions)

     OVERLEAF_EMAIL_FROM_ADDRESS: [e-mail]
     OVERLEAF_EMAIL_SMTP_HOST: smtp.example.com
     OVERLEAF_EMAIL_SMTP_PORT: "587"
     OVERLEAF_EMAIL_SMTP_SECURE: "false"
     OVERLEAF_EMAIL_SMTP_USER: [e-mail]
     # optional
     # OVERLEAF_EMAIL_REPLY_TO: [e-mail]
     # OVERLEAF_EMAIL_SMTP_IGNORE_TLS: "false"
     # OVERLEAF_EMAIL_SMTP_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTH: "true"
   

   OVERLEAF_EMAIL_FROM_ADDRESS turns sending on. Set it only together with the SMTP server (or SES): with the sender alone, Ayakaleaf Pro tries an SMTP server inside the pod, and every email fails. Without it, emails are not sent, only written to web.log.

   OVERLEAF_EMAIL_SMTP_SECURE, OVERLEAF_EMAIL_SMTP_IGNORE_TLS and OVERLEAF_EMAIL_SMTP_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTH are read as JSON, so use "true" or "false": a value such as yes stops every service of the pod at startup.

2. Secret

   kubectl -n overleaf patch secret overleaf-secrets --type merge \
     -p '{"stringData":{"OVERLEAF_EMAIL_SMTP_PASS":"<SMTP password>"}}'
   

   For the Amazon SES API, put OVERLEAF_EMAIL_AWS_SES_ACCESS_KEY_ID and OVERLEAF_EMAIL_AWS_SES_SECRET_KEY here instead, and OVERLEAF_EMAIL_DRIVER: ses and OVERLEAF_EMAIL_AWS_SES_REGION into the ConfigMap.

3. Apply, restart and test

   kubectl apply -f 30-config.yaml
   kubectl -n overleaf rollout restart deployment/overleaf     # or statefulset/overleaf
   

   Send yourself a password reset email from the login page. If it does not arrive, check the SMTP server is reachable from the pods and look at the web log:

   kubectl -n overleaf exec deploy/overleaf -- bash -c 'echo > /dev/tcp/smtp.example.com/587 && echo reachable'
   kubectl -n overleaf exec deploy/overleaf -- grep -iE "email|smtp" /var/log/overleaf/web.log | tail
   

Several replicas

Nothing extra. Every replica sends with the same settings, and the sending rate limit is counted in Redis across all replicas. If your SMTP server only accepts known senders, allow the addresses the pods leave the cluster with (usually the nodes’).

Tested on Kubernetes

With Mailpit as the SMTP server, on Kubernetes 1.37 with one replica, our end-to-end tests that send email pass: the activation email of an account an admin creates, the activation email of a self-registration limited to domains, the password reset email, the email telling a user their account was deleted, and what happens when the SMTP server refuses an activation or deletion email: the account is still created or deleted, and the activation email can be sent again later. With OVERLEAF_EMAIL_FROM_ADDRESS and no SMTP host, a password reset request failed with an error and web.log showed “error sending message”, as described above.