Swift Mailer Module & Gmail SMTP

**michatmaster7** · Mar 19th, 2013, 11:34 AM

After several weeks and COUNTLESS hours of troubleshooting and tickets back and forth with the web host about this, there was finally a resolution. Here si what the webhost finally said:

"I had a member of our Security team help me diagnose this issue, and Jonathan was able to pin this down as being an SMTP block on our shared server."

"To provide some insight, we block outbound SMTP connections because many malicious scripts that compromise accounts use SMTP outbound for SPAM. This is a common practice in our shared server due to the number of domains or users. This may not be the case on your Dedi due to configuration differences. We employ very script settings on Shared servers to ensure that our clients are secure from all sorts of attacks and spam."

So, even thought the technical support team said the ports were open and things "should" work (they blamed the FormTools script, of course), the Security Team had blocks in place preventing external SMTP protocols from working, because it was a shared server. The tech support team apparently did not understand this.

They were happy to disable the blocks on individual cPanel user accounts by request and external FMTP using gmail's configuration settings are working as intended. Thought I would post this update for anyone checking out this thread.

***Joe*** · Mar 22nd, 2013, 1:27 PM

That is great information to have. Thank you so much for sharing that.

Cheers,

Joseph

chalorlay · Mar 23rd, 2013, 3:14 AM

michatmaster7, heres my setting that works now.

Form Tools Core Version: 2.2.5
Core Version Upgrade Track: 2.2.5
API Version: 1.1.4
PHP Version: 5.3.19
MySQL Version: 5.1.68-cll
PHP Sessions: Available
Suhosin Extension: Not Installed
Curl Extension: Available
SimpleXML Extension: Available
____________________________________
MODULES (name, version, enabled)
Core Field Types, 1.0.2, Yes
Export Manager, 2.1.1, Yes
File Upload, 1.1.0, Yes
Form Backup, 1.1.4, Yes
Pages, 1.2.6, Yes
Swift Mailer, 1.1.2, Yes
System Check, 1.0.3, Yes
TinyMCE Field, 1.0.8, Yes
____________________________________
THEMES (name, version, enabled)
Classic Grey, 1.1.3, No
Default, 1.0.0, Yes

***Joe*** · Mar 27th, 2013, 11:02 AM

Thanks for sharing Chalorlay!

**alexh** · Aug 19th, 2015, 2:42 PM

Today I upgraded to PHP 5.6 and suddenly Swift Mailer decided to stop working.

"There was a problem communicating with SMTP: The SMTP connection failed to start [ssl://host.mydomain.com:465]: fsockopen returned Error Number 0 and Error String ''"

If I disable SSL and switch to my non SSL port, it works fine. My host advised they added port 465 to TCP_OUT:

Any ideas??? Seems interesting this happened when I upgraded to PHP 5.6

vovpublishing · (This post was last modified: Feb 4th, 2016, 6:49 PM by vovpublishing.)

This is not functioning properly for me. As a matter of fact, since I've been using this service the email feature with or without Swift Mailer activated has never worked once regardless of settings. (It could just be a bit of ignorance on my part...)

This is the current error that I receive when attempting to test the connection.

There was a problem communicating with SMTP: The SMTP connection failed to start [ssl://smtp.att.yahoo.com:465]: fsockopen returned Error Number 110 and Error String 'Connection timed out'

same thing with a gmail account.

There was a problem communicating with SMTP: The SMTP connection failed to start [ssl://smtp.gmail.com:465]: fsockopen returned Error Number 110 and Error String 'Connection timed out'

I read in an earlier response that it may have something to do with the port being blocked by my site's host server, so I'll contact them and update. It's a bit confusing and I hope that someone can assist in the matter because there isn't much software out there like ftools and I was really excited to use the service.

**michatmaster7** · Feb 6th, 2016, 2:17 PM

Yep, this is a problem with your web server where FT is installed. The FT installation (on your web server) needs access to port 465 on the server where it resides, in order to communicate with external e-mail providers. Does that make sense? Let me see if this helps:

(FormTools installed on Web Host) -->
attempting to send e-mail by connecting to Yahoo -->
FormTools cannot use port 465 on this (Web Host) server to connect to Yahoo

Thus, FormTools never actually connected to the Yahoo or Gmail servers in order to actually send out the message.

vovpublishing · Feb 8th, 2016, 7:44 AM

(Feb 6th, 2016, 2:17 PM)michatmaster7 Wrote: Yep, this is a problem with your web server where FT is installed. The FT installation (on your web server) needs access to port 465 on the server where it resides, in order to communicate with external e-mail providers. Does that make sense? Let me see if this helps:

(FormTools installed on Web Host) -->
attempting to send e-mail by connecting to Yahoo -->
FormTools cannot use port 465 on this (Web Host) server to connect to Yahoo

Thus, FormTools never actually connected to the Yahoo or Gmail servers in order to actually send out the message.

Yes, thank you. I was able to contact them and they confirmed that the port is blocked...the downfall of free hosting.

**michatmaster7** · Feb 9th, 2016, 10:21 AM

Glad that it's working for you now!

Sidenote:
Having that port blocked is not specific to free hosting. It would likely have been blocked by ANY web host, be default. And I would argue that's not actually a "downfall" - having that port blocked is meant to help keep your account (and the server) more secure, by disabling things that most people wouldn't use anyway, it limits the number of ways that someone can potentially gain access to the server.

nelsondcosta · Feb 5th, 2018, 5:03 AM

If someone use OVH as a host.
This are the configurations.

Ovh.net (OVH) SMTP Server ssl0.ovh.net
SMTP port 465
SMTP security TLS
SMTP username Your full email address
SMTP password Your Ovh.net password

FORUMS