Using Gmail's SMTP

First off, I really like this plugin. Thanks for all of the work you do on it.

I wanted to use Gmail’s SMTP instead of my host’s PHP mailer because occasionally, mail would be caught up in spam filters. (I had forgotten an old mailer script and it was exploited and now my server is sometimes considered possible spam.)

I could not get this to work, kept giving me the message that it couldn’t connect with Gmail’s SMTP. I don’t even remember how I found this, just tinkering around.

The SMTP settings don’t work with GMAIL. They are set to SSL and port 465. I had WP SMTP set up, and had tested it earlier on Gmail, and it worked fine. So I used those settings, which are TLS and port 587.

Now it works fine on Wysija.

But, I had to go into the plugin files and find the instances of these settings and manually change them. Then I apparently updated the plugin and all of a sudden, I’m getting the can’t connect message again.

I finally remembered that I had done all the changing earlier, so redid all that again. And now it’s working fine again.

For others having the same problem with GMail SMTP, before giving up, you might try this. These files need to be edited:

helpers/email.php
helpers/mailer.php
models/config.php

just do a search for 465 and you’ll find that plus ‘ssl’

Change 465 to 587 and ssl to tls in those three files.

It worked for me. I don’t know if this is something set up on my host, or if it’s a gmail thing.

For future updates, it might not be a bad idea to add something in the settings that the user can use, to change these two values if they’re having problems getting SMTP to work.

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wysija-newsletters/