EmailBackend cannot be configured with use_ssl=True

[tobiashuste]

Is your feature request related to a problem?
The EmailBackend already offers the option to configure the usage of SSL/TLS via a member variable . Unfortunately, this variable is not exposed throughout a configuration variable. STARTTLS can be configured using the variable SMTP_USE_TLS. Our mail server does not accept STARTTLS and thus, sending mails cannot be configured without manual code changes.

Describe the solution you'd like
I'd like to introduce an optional configuration variable called SMTP_USE_SSL which is set to False by default and which is also not exposed throughout the setup process. This way, I would expect to not cause any irritating new behavior.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Currently, we patch the Indico code base manually. It would be nice, to not be required to do so in the future.

[ThiefMaster]

STARTTLS on the submission port (587) is the de-facto standard for authenticated email sending. I would recommend you to ask whoever is running your mail server to consider enabling it (this is usually trivial, especially compared to all the other things involved with operating a mail server).

However, if you sent a PR that adds a SMTP_USE_SSL option that does it properly both for sending emails from indico itself and from the error logger, we could include this in 2.3 (please also add it to the docs, since it lists all the config options).

[tobiashuste]

Thanks for your answer! Let me again see, what I can achieve. Otherwise, I'll prepare a PR for that.