How to Set Up Email Notifications in Coolify with Reloop SMTP

Coolify can email you when a deployment fails, a backup breaks, or a server goes offline — but only after you give it a way to send mail. This guide walks through connecting Coolify’s email notifications to Reloop’s SMTP relay. It takes about ten minutes, and the free tier covers everything a Coolify instance will ever send.

By the end you will have a working Notifications > Email channel, a test email in your inbox, and the option to share one configuration across every team on your instance.

What Coolify email notifications do

Coolify runs your apps, databases, backups and cron jobs unattended. Notifications are how it tells you when something happened that you’d want to know about: a deployment succeeded or failed, a scheduled backup errored, a container stopped, a server stopped responding, or disk usage crossed a threshold.

Email is one of several notification channels (alongside Discord, Telegram, Slack, Pushover and webhooks). It’s the channel most teams start with, because every team already has an inbox and nothing else needs installing.

The catch is that Coolify has no mail server of its own. It has to hand each message to a provider that can deliver it, and you have to tell it which one. The team-level Notifications > Email page offers four options:

1. Hosted email service
2. System-wide settings
3. SMTP server
4. Resend

If you self-host — which is most Coolify users — the hosted option isn’t there, and you need to bring a provider. Reloop plugs into the SMTP server option, and this guide covers both the per-team setup and the instance-wide one.

Prerequisites

1. A running Coolify instance (self-hosted or Cloud) where you’re an admin of the team you want to configure.
2. A Reloop account — the free tier (3,000 emails/month).
3. A domain you control, so you can add DNS records for it.
4. Outbound port 587 open from the Coolify server. Most VPS providers allow it; if you’re on a provider that blocks all outbound SMTP you’ll see a connection timeout in step 4.

Step 1: Verify a domain and create an API key in Reloop
Reloop will only send from a domain you’ve proved you own. Do this part first; the SMTP login succeeds regardless, but mail from an unverified domain is rejected at send time.

1. In the Reloop dashboard, open Domains and add the domain you’ll send from (for example alerts.yourdomain.com or just yourdomain.com).
2. Add the DNS records Reloop shows you — SPF, DKIM and a DMARC record — at your DNS provider. Propagation usually takes a few minutes, occasionally up to an hour.
3. Wait for the domain to show as Verified.
4. Open API keys and create a key. Give it a name you’ll recognise later, like coolify-notifications. Copy it now — it's shown once.

You’ll use the API key as the SMTP password in the next step.

Step 2: Configure SMTP in Coolify
In Coolify, open your team’s Notifications page and select Email. The section is titled Email delivery.

1. Under Email service, choose Use team email settings. (On self-hosted instances the other option is Use system-wide settings; see step 3 if you’d rather set it once for every team.)
2. Fill in From name and From address before anything else. Both are required, and Coolify will refuse to enable SMTP while either is empty. The address must be on the domain you verified in step 1 — for example [e-mail].
3. Under SMTP delivery, enter the relay details:

Step 3 (optional): Set it once for the whole instance
If you self-host and have more than one team, you don’t want to paste the same API key into each one. Coolify lets the instance admin configure a single transactional email provider that every team can reuse.

1. Open Settings > Email (you need to be an instance admin, not just a team admin).
2. Enter the same sender and SMTP values from step 2, enable SMTP, and save.
3. Use Send Test Email on that page and confirm it arrives before going further.
4. Back in each team’s Notifications > Email, set Email service to Use system-wide settings.

Step 4: Choose events and send a test
Still on Notifications > Email, scroll to Notification settings. Events are grouped under Deployments, Resources, Backups, Scheduled tasks and Server. A sensible starting set:

1. Deployments: failed (successful deploys get noisy fast)
2. Backups: failed
3. Scheduled tasks: failed
4. Server: unreachable, disk usage threshold

Then select Send test at the top of the page, enter an address you can check, and send. The message should arrive within a few seconds. If it lands in spam the first time, that’s normal for a brand-new sending domain; mark it as not spam and later messages will land in the inbox.

You can also see the message in the Reloop dashboard under Logs, with the delivery status and the raw headers — useful when you’re not sure whether Coolify sent anything at all.