Google announcing<\/a> they are making as many of their services prefer IPv6 where supported. (The link is the best I could find…the original announcement is gone.)<\/p>\n\n\n\nSo there’s the problem… the PHP socket stuff is having a hard time with the IPv6 connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, if you run the following command from the web server’s terminal, you’ll see all the things that are related to the smtp.gmail.com domain:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
root@web:\/home\/web# dig +short smtp.gmail.com\ngmail-smtp-msa.l.google.com.\n173.194.208.108\n173.194.208.109<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nTwo of those are IP addresses. One of them is a domain, and is of little use to us: we already have the smtp.gmail.com domain, and we can’t put a domain into the left-side of the hosts file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Take either of the IP addresses, and insert them into your \/etc\/hosts file…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
root@web:\/home\/web# sudo vi \/etc\/hosts\n### \n173.194.208.108 smtp.gmail.com\n:wq<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nSave the file, go back to the phpBB interface and make sure:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Use STMP server for email: yes<\/strong><\/li>Your password is an App Password<\/li> Your username, from, reply-to, and other email addresses are the Google Account for the App Password<\/li> The domain is: ssl:\/\/smtp.gmail.com<\/strong> (you might be able to use tls:\/\/<\/strong>)<\/li>The port is: 465<\/strong> (you might be able to use 587<\/strong> for TLS)<\/li>Verify SSL Cert: yes<\/strong><\/li>Verify SMTP Peer: yes<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\nThen hit the “Send a test email” button in the top section. Once you do, you should get: a fairly quick green success message page, no errors in the log, and an email that arrives to the user account you are currently logged into.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt worked. Finally.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nAlternatives<\/h2>\n\n\n\n I haven’t tried some of these alternatives, because I was able to get it working via the method above. However, if you can’t<\/strong> make changes to the \/etc\/hosts file, perhaps try some of the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\nCreate a DNS entry that points a subdomain you can control to the IP (or if possible, both IPs) for the smtp.gmail.com server.<\/li> Create an email account via the webhost\/cpanel interface, or maybe even the domain registrar, and go the self-hosted route. At least it’ll be fully under your control, and you can IMAP the account into another Gmail account, and tag those messages via Filters, if you need to receive them.This is the solution I originally used, until I moved my domain over to Google Apps, causing this problem in the first place.<\/li><\/ul><\/li> Or as a last resort, change the code making the request to use a PHP library that will support making calls directly to the original domain. There are many support threads about this problem that end with simply changing the properties sent to the mailer class.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\nLet me know in the comments if you have found a different solution, or see problems with my approach (other than the obvious and expected “Unexpected IP Changes” or “Single IP, no redundancy”).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How I ended up fixing phpBB’s connection to smtp.gmail.com, and getting the-spot.net’s email back online.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Connecting to Gmail in phpBB","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[910,3,9,347],"tags":[966,968,350,964,152,47,965,967,969],"class_list":["post-2170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-fixes","category-tech","category-the-spot-net","category-the-spot-network","tag-connection-timed-out","tag-email-error","tag-forums","tag-gmail","tag-php","tag-phpbb","tag-smtp-gmail-com","tag-stream_socket_client","tag-unable-to-connect-to-smtp-gmail-com"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thepizzy.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/splash-1.png?fit=1980%2C960&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prOO4-z0","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2236,"url":"https:\/\/thepizzy.net\/blog\/2020\/01\/phpbb-extension-template-partials\/","url_meta":{"origin":2170,"position":0},"title":"phpBB extension Template Partials","author":"[[Neo]]","date":"January 19, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been working on replacing the front-end for the-spot.net and thus, the front-end of phpBB forums, using only the phpBB extension framework, trying to avoid having to put custom code into the core files, as was required pre-3.2 for some of my features. 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