Hey there! We've found the following might help you get unblocked faster:

• 🧵 Failed to send email: [Errno 101] Network is unreachable

• 🧵 Consistently unable to apt install and connect to [archive.ubuntu.com](archive.ubuntu.com) with nixpacks

• 🧵 All builds failing (possible connection to Ubuntu servers being down or Chromium infrastructure)

If you find the answer from one of these, please let us know by solving the thread!

Hello,

Outbound SMTP connections are blocked on Railway to prevent abuse and protect our IP reputation.

For sending emails from your application, please use a dedicated email service that provides HTTPS APIs. More information can be found in our documentation:

https://docs.railway.com/reference/outbound-networking

Best regards,

The Railway Team

You guys could've at least given us a heads up so we could've migrated before blocking them altogether, the emails were working just fine until today and broke one of my applications.

Same happened to us! It would be great to receive a notification a few days or hours before applying the block so we could migrate to APIs. We're currently using Amazon SES but via SMTP, we'll switch to api but got a few complaints due to the downtime of the emails not being sent...

Our sincerest apologies. We did not foresee a great impact here, given we thought we had been blocking outbound SMTP all along, but going forward, we will make sure to publicly announce firewall additions that have potential user impact.

Same here. My app was working perfect until this morning.

It's not cool that you didn't warn us. All my apps are broken. This is where I draw the line with Railway.

Same. That was handled really unprofessionally. I wasted almost a day now trying to figure out why it suddenly stopped working until I found this post. At least put it somewhere public like the changelog/discord so people dont waste hours digging through search results and their codebase. This really should have been announced in advance so people can transition to alternatives.

Hi!
One app broke here.

Wtf dudes, You can't do it...I lose 5 clients today...

Hi guys,

Same for me. I've tried almost a day trying to figure out what's happening and now I see this post and it was really unprofessionally...

Hi guys,

Same here, i took almost all day trying to figure out why it just stopped working. Not cool, i had many problems with my users today.

Same for me. i can not understand how a team can be this unprofesional, the whole morning debuggind to find out you guys block it with no warning! Render here i go!

Just spent hours debugging this on production... do we have a fix for this? Or can this block be lifted until we have time to work out a solution to this? No emails are going out for my many customers, which breaks their businesses.

I can't implement several different APIs for many different customers at a moment's notice. Can you please reverse this ASAP so we have some breathing space to un-break our customers?

I just canceled my suscription here! congrats team hope you lose more clients like we did!

I am using Django - if anyone else uses it and is affected by this outage, then I can really recommend the django-anymail package. It is a drop-in replacement for the standard Django mail provider, and transparently supports all the common ESPs, and can handle multiple mail accounts on different ESPs. It was literally a few line fix on the server.

I'm pulling a late night moving all my customers over to APIs: SMTP was ideal, because it was a universal interface for all customers, but better to be able to give an ETA for the fix.

same with me, piling onto this thread so that your team knows to hopefully at least send out an email or something ahead of time. I was fully unaware. This will be a pain to fix..

same with me, it broke an app, I am using Resend with SMTP and got errors from blocking sending mails

Hi. Apologies here. There was a misunderstanding internally where we'd had the SMTP port (25) blocked forever

We noticed an issue where a small subset of hosts didn't have this block, so a ticket was created. During this, the engineer added ports 465, 587, and 2525 to exhaustively block SMTP (instead of just the original 25).

Given this change in behavior, we 100% should have announced it. But wires got crossed internally on that ticket, because we were "already blocking SMTP"

We've rolled back the change, and as of right now, we've unblocked SMTP for all Pro and Enterprise customers. For those who struggled through this in the thread prior, I've issued each of you a credit of a months bill or the cost of a month of Pro (whichever is larger)

We can look into potentially expanding this to other plans in the future. To give a bit more color, we get a LOT of abuse across hundreds of thousands of users per month, and we take your email deliverability seriously (which includes protecting our IPs)

Same literally the whole day i wasted trying to work this out yesterday

same situation, spent hours trying to fix.

Same here, spend the whole day with that. We are currently Hobby plan, if we upgrade to Pro, it will work inmediately? I need to redeploy? please advise.

Yeah, thats what i did and it solved it. once upgraded to pro you need to redeploy your services tho

Does this mean smtp will be available for pro users indefinitely? If so I am willing to upgrade, but just curious.

Did you need to wait any specific time? I upgrade to PRO and redeploy one of the services failing but still seeing the same results. Before someone ask about it... I was than desperate that I built a connectivity page hehe

Worked straight away for me after redeploy

For me took around 15 minutes, but now is working. Thanks casselv!

No prior notifications, alerts, messages, emails, we arn't any genious to guess this will happen. You should atleast give us some time before taking this step.
I can't just upgrade to pro, we all have some limitations,you should understand this.

exactly...

We will switch to Render after this incident. Our system relies on outbound emails. Our current system is not rolled out in production yet but in stage - would this have happend in production the company would go down in flames. (B2C with very very angry C)

We have plans to sign on a big contract with Railway, but although I love the UX of this service, it's shaking our confidence that a PaaS would close critical ports on production services with no notice, leaving us wondering what was going on and scrambling for a whole day + night to fix it.

We really, really need an assurance that this sort of thing will not happen again in the future when our business is potentially much bigger, with too many customers to apologise to personally.

We need do something now? redeploy our project? I saw the messages but it doesn't for me, I can't send messages for now...thanks

I was really excited to try/host my app on Railway until now I found this forum for this specific issue everyone is facing. I thought my app had the issue and wasted hours for nothing. The team making changes without notifications seems pretty unprofessional. I am thinking about other alternatives. Any suggestions?

Railway is good, yes, this was a fail (a big fail) but in 8 months, 0 problems

I will have to re-think. Thanks anyways

I thinks this is one ways to reduce Hobby customers, like me
Because we required SMTP with google to kept the cost too cheap with our customer, but Railway block that
This make us denied by our customers

This took down my production app, too!

On this page it says I should still be able to do SMTP because I'm on pro plan, but it stopped working. https://docs.railway.com/reference/outbound-networking

Help!

Hey, have you tried redeploying your service?

Yes still fails!

Yes still fails!

To everyone in this thread, SMTP is now only available on pro plan and above to prevent spam and abuse as per the newly updated docs. Furthermore it still recommended to use email services that have an HTTPS API, even if you have SMTP available. A list of email service examples can also be found in the docs.

Please open your own dedicated thread so that you can provide more context without flooding the inbox of other users in this thread.

OK. Could have said that less rudely for something you broke.

I didn't mean to sound rude, although in retrospective I can see that it may sound like that, sorry for that.

This is still an issue for us. what do we do?

I am facing the same issue. I tried using Gmail, Mailgun, and SendGrid, but SMTP is blocked. I need to rewrite my email code again using HTTP requests. Please, Railway, revert it back.

Please restore access it, I have three long-term clients and an application that has been deployed for over a year, which is now not working. Kindly restore or provide instructions on how to unblock it.

Hey, please kindly read the message I have sent previously in this thread below.

To everyone in this thread, SMTP is now only available on pro plan and above to prevent spam and abuse as per the newly updated docs. Furthermore it still recommended to use email services that have an HTTPS API, even if you have SMTP available. A list of email service examples can also be found in the docs.