Issue starting grafana-server: invalid email address for SMTP from_address config

Grafana Configuration
1
  • What Grafana version and what operating system are you using?

Grafana 11.6.1, on Ubuntu server 24.04.2

  • What are you trying to achieve?

Starting up the server after trying some SMTP settings, which I removed

  • How are you trying to achieve it?

systemctl restart grafana-server

  • What happened?

journalctl -xeu grafana-server.service

gives this entry

invalid email address for SMTP from_address config

  • What did you expect to happen?

Successful launching of grafana-server

  • Can you copy/paste the configuration(s) that you are having problems with?

I tried to configure SMTP, but reverted it to:

[smtp]
enabled = false
;host = localhost:25
;user =

If the password contains # or ; you have to wrap it with triple quotes. Ex “”“#password;”“”

;password =
;cert_file =
;key_file =
;skip_verify = false
;from_address = admin@grafana.localhost
;from_name = Grafana

EHLO identity in SMTP dialog (defaults to instance_name)

;ehlo_identity = dashboard.example.com

SMTP startTLS policy (defaults to ‘OpportunisticStartTLS’)

;startTLS_policy = NoStartTLS

Enable trace propagation in e-mail headers, using the ‘traceparent’, ‘tracestate’ and (optionally) ‘baggage’ fields (defaults to false)

;enable_tracing = false

I don’t understand how I can have SMTP “enabled = false” and still get a from_address error

  • Did you receive any errors in the Grafana UI or in related logs? If so, please tell us exactly what they were.

Logs are set to debug and include console, yet they have no error message, only the journalctl command gives some hints

  • Did you follow any online instructions? If so, what is the URL?

I googled for this error message but got no relevant hits

2

What happens if you comment out ;enabled=false

And restart

3

It does the same thing, same error message. I do not know the startup sequence of grafana, could it be that a bad value is in the SQLite3 database and this caused the service start error before the grafana.ini file gets to be applied/loaded?

4

next possibility is are you editing the wrong ini?

what kind of install is this? docker? linux?

5

It is under Ubuntu 24.04.02.

I saw in the journalctl output that it was loading 2 different .ini files, grafana.ini and defaults.ini

They had the same settings so I replaced the defaults.ini with a symlink to the grafana.ini

Their was a second grafana.ini that was not loaded (as seen, or more accurately not seen as shown in journalctl), so I also replaced it with a symlink to the grafana.ini file that was loaded in case it would somehow switch to that file.

I also looked at the contents of the SQLite3 database, and there does not seem to be any invalid from_address in there.

6

I would avoid doing extra curricular activities such as symlink-ing etc as I am not sure that is documented.

check this out if you have not already

7

I have edited the grafana.ini file to put a valid email address in the from_address field and uncommented it. Now I get this error message:

Error: ✗ initializing GMS client: missing GMS domain

8

FYI when I do systemctl restart grafana-server, it stays up for about a second before failing with the error message shown above. If I launch immediately systemctl status grafana-server, right afterwards, it shows active, if I run it a second time right afterwards, it now shows “failed”