SMTP Authentication Changes in DXP
The provider for SMTP services and transactional e-mails in DXP are making some changes around authentication methods during this quarter. The changes will move away from basic authentication with username and password, and instead use API keys for authentication.
So what does this mean for you?
If you are using the SMTP service that is a part of DXP, you will need to make some modifications to your <smtp> section in the web configuration file. Start by navigating to the management portal - within your DXP project and the “API” tab you will now find an option to generate API keys.
After generating an API key (it’s only viewable directly after creation, so save it), grab the username and hostname as well from the management portal. You’re then ready to modify configuration in your deployment packages.
<configuration> <system.net> <mailSettings> <smtp from="yourdefaultreply@address.com"> <network host="smtp.sendgrid.net" password="[API key generated in management portal]" userName="apikey" port="[587, 465, 25 or 2525]" /> </smtp> </mailSettings> </system.net> </configuration>
And that’s it, you’re all set to deploy to your environments in DXP. Sendgrid does have a hard deadline of January 20th where they will stop supporting basic authentication. If you are currently using basic authentication and cannot make the changes ahead of the deadline, we will run a migration close to the deadline to do this automatically and transform configuration files, but note that we will block any deployments after this migration if we notice that basic authentication is used. This is to ensure that transactional e-mails keep working as expected.
We apologize for the late heads-up for this and our aim is to make this transition as smooth as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Best regards,
Elias Lundmark
Product Manager, Cloud Services
Although these are tagged as DXP Blog posts world could really do with an offical platform changes feed that we could keep track on. I woud hope notification of these sorts of things would be set to clients/agencies as well directly but I've not seen an communcation.
It appears this works outside of dxp enviroments. as soon as the credentials are used in a dxp enviroment, it does not send. Is this by default?
@Scott, thanks for the feedback! There is definitely room for improvement in our communications with things like these. For now, you can subscribe to our status page at https://status.episerver.com/ to get notifications - ideally we'd have something similar through the paasportal down the line.
@Joshua, I can't really tell why that behavior is. I'd recommend reaching out to our support for technical assistance https://support.episerver.com/hc/en-us.
For sure. I did. On that note. Thanks for keeping us posted and appreciate all the work you guys put in to make the product more self sufficiant.
Thanks I must of missed this on the status update. To be honest I wasn't expecting it there, I thought it would be notified in a different way rather than through maintenance updates.
After you click 'Generate API Key', make sure you click 'Copy API Key' in the menu, the entire key is not shown.
Thanks for the heads up.
Agreed on the communications front - I think there also needs to be some stronger communication around prouct updates that fix critical vulnerabilities too.
Does it means after Jan 21th the email sending via user/pass authentication mode won't send?
"if you are currently using basic authentication and cannot make the changes ahead of the deadline, we will run a migration close to the deadline to do this automatically and transform configuration files, but note that we will block any deployments after this migration if we notice that basic authentication is used. This is to ensure that transactional e-mails keep working as expected. "
as per this comment, if we couldn't do the deployment by Jan 20th, it means that Epi will update the config file with api key and it won't block the email sending functionality on our websites? Just any othe deployment will be block though?
@Vahid: You're correct. User/Pass authentication will be disabled by SendGrid on the 20th of January. If you haven't migrated your site before then, we will go ahead and update the configuration for you automatically. If we then detect that a new deployment is happening to that site using a username/password, the deployment will be blocked to ensure e-mails work as expected from the site.