Email Setup for Community Portal

Overview

Foundation Cloud Community Portal (FC Community Portal) sends out various notification emails including password reset, reference requests and more. These automated emails use a common process called SMTP relay. That means the Community Portal will use the foundation email to send emails. If configured incorrectly, users will see error messages and report problems. The settings are set in the Site Admin portal – Settings page – Email Settings section.

If you are using FC Community Portal 1.x then emails are sent from the FC Community Portal Services web server. If you are using FC Community Portal 2.x then emails are sent from the FC Community Portal API web server. Additionally, NPact offers the use of SendGrid which takes the complexities of configuration out of SMTP and into a clean API, reducing the support requirements for NPact and for each foundation. For more information on enabling SendGrid, please see this document.

Email Settings

At first glance this may look complicated but these setting are basic to all email systems. The settings may vary a little by Portal version. For FC Community Portal 2.x the built-in help system describes each of the settings which depend on which email service you are using.

1. In the Community Portal go to Site Admin > Settings > Email Settings section.
2. Add the SMTP email server
3. The email address that the portal will use to send messages
4. And the corresponding password for that email address
5. Add the port and SSL requirements
6. Save (very bottom of the page

Testing the email function

The settings can be tested using the “Send a Test Email” button. If your email server returns an error, it will be displayed under the button. Keep in mind that these error messages are not FC Community Portal error messages; they are your mail server’s error messages so NPact does not necessarily know what those errors mean except by Googling them.

1. In the Community Portal go to Site Admin > Settings > Email Settings section
2.  Enter your email and click Send a Test Email

Always test your email configuration. In addition to the test button described above you can go to Site Admin – Configure Emails – and use the Send Test Email button to see samples of various email templates. You can also use that page to test sending emails with CC addresses.

NOTE: If your emails are being sent from a server hosted by NPact then they must go out on port 587.

To troubleshoot an error message please see this document Here.