PEAR Mail unable to connect to Gmail SMTP, failed to connect to socket

Question

Facts

I am using PEAR Mail, I want to use gmail SMTP to send a mail. I have Apache/2.4.27 (Win64) PHP/7.2.0beta3, PEAR 1.10.15, Mail 1.4.1, Net_SMT

Answer 1

Few debugging steps :

1. check phpinfo

I recommend checking phpinfo() to check whether all modules are enabled. Check for mail, fsocketopen.

2. Enable debug flag

Enable debug flag to check exactly what's the problem. Like below.

$smtp = Mail::factory('smtp', array(
        'host' => 'ssl://smtp.gmail.com',
        'port' => '465',
        'auth' => true,
        'debug' => true,
        'pipelining' => true,
        'username' => 'xxx@gmail.com',
        'password' => 'xxx'
    ));

After running above code on my machine I got follow response. Issue can be different from yours. But debug helped me. As I have 2FA enabled, it gave me error. And I got a mail also, that my login has been blocked.

DEBUG: Recv: 220 smtp.gmail.com ESMTP s65sm4891344pfi.36 - gsmtp DEBUG: Send: EHLO localhost DEBUG: Recv: 250-smtp.gmail.com at your service, [110.227.210.84] DEBUG: Recv: 250-SIZE 35882577 DEBUG: Recv: 250-8BITMIME DEBUG: Recv: 250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN XOAUTH2 PLAIN-CLIENTTOKEN OAUTHBEARER XOAUTH DEBUG: Recv: 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES DEBUG: Recv: 250-PIPELINING DEBUG: Recv: 250-CHUNKING DEBUG: Recv: 250 SMTPUTF8 DEBUG: Send: AUTH LOGIN DEBUG: Recv: 334 VsadfSFcm5hbWU6 DEBUG: Send: cGF0ZWwuZ29wYhkafdaASFnbWFpbC5jb20= DEBUG: Recv: 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 DEBUG: Send: OWwzMy5zaHlAbTE4 DEBUG: Recv: 534-5.7.14 Please log in via your web browser and DEBUG: Recv: 534-5.7.14 then try again. DEBUG: Recv: 534-5.7.14 Learn more at DEBUG: Recv: 534 5.7.14 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78754 s65sm4891344pfi.36 - gsmtp DEBUG: Send: RSET DEBUG: Send: QUIT DEBUG: Recv: 250 2.1.5 Flushed s65sm4891344pfi.36 - gsmtp DEBUG: Recv: 221 2.0.0 closing connection s65sm4891344pfi.36 - gsmtp
authentication failure [SMTP: Invalid response code received from server (code: 534, response: 5.7.14 Please log in via your web browser and 5.7.14 then try again. 5.7.14 Learn more at 5.7.14 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78754 s65sm4891344pfi.36 - gsmtp)]

Update:

Your issue looks like PHP is not even able to connect to gmail server.