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

In PHP 5.3, the tip given by others about "less secure apps," that need to be activated when logged into your Google Gmail account, solved all my problems.

In PHP 7.2 I had to do more: setting 'auth' to PLAIN and then add "verify_peer" and verify_peer_name for ssl socket_options like this:

$mail= Mail::factory('smtp', array('host' => 'ssl://smtp.gmail.com',
                                   'port' => '465',
                                   'auth' => 'PLAIN',
                                   'socket_options' => array('ssl' => array('verify_peer' => false,
                                                                            'verify_peer_name' => false)),
                                   'username' => 'someAccount@gmail.com',
                                   'password' => 'myPassword'
));

Answer 2

Been Kyung-yoong is the only person to have made a meaningful contribution to solving the problem so far (+1 Been!). I can confirm his result. And I would recommend you try the same. You are currently trying to debug a rather complex stack of components:

• Error is being thrown by PEAR smtp here
• Which is failing when it calls Net_SMTP::connect()
• which is a wrapper around Net_Socket::connect()
• which is rather elaborate wrapper around fsockopen()

Been is doing your job for you - as the person posting the question - should be creating a Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example

This will hopefully also provide more meaningful diagnostic information.

The most likely reasons for this to be failing are:

• the host you are running this on cannot route outgoing connections to the internet (but since you seem to be using a desktop PC, I would think you might have noticed this by now)
• the code is running within a security sandbox (but MSWindows doesn't really have such things)
• the host is unable to resolve the hostname (see first point about routing)
• the host is able to connect but unable to verify the certificate

Hence you might consider this more elaborate implementation of a test script:

 <?php

 error_reporting(E_ALL);

 print "DNS\n";
 var_dump(getmxrr('gmail.com',$result));
 var_dump($result);
 $use_ip=gethostbyname($result[0]);
 print "IPV4 address = $use_ip\n";

 print "\nIf you've got this far without errors then problem is with your SSL config\n";
 $calocns=openssl_get_cert_locations();
 if (count($calocns)) {
     print "Check you've got your cacerts deployed in one of the following locations\n";
     foreach ($calocns as $k=>$v) print "$k = $v\n";
 } else {
     print "You've not configured your openssl installation on this host\n";
 }

 print "\nIf all good so far, then this bit should work....\n";
 print "fsockopen\n";
 var_dump(fsockopen("ssl://smtp.gmail.com", 465, $errno, $errstr, 3.0));
 var_dump($errno);
 var_dump($errstr);

Which should give you a response like this:

 DNS
 bool(true)
 array(5) {
   [0]=>
   string(31) "alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com"
   [1]=>
   string(31) "alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com"
   [2]=>
   string(31) "alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com"
   [3]=>
   string(26) "gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com"
   [4]=>
   string(31) "alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com"
 }
 IPV4 address = 74.125.131.26

 If you've got this far without errors then problem is with your SSL config
 Check you've got your cacerts deployed in one of the following locations
 default_cert_file = /usr/lib/ssl/cert.pem
 default_cert_file_env = SSL_CERT_FILE
 default_cert_dir = /usr/lib/ssl/certs
 default_cert_dir_env = SSL_CERT_DIR
 default_private_dir = /usr/lib/ssl/private
 default_default_cert_area = /usr/lib/ssl
 ini_cafile =
 ini_capath =

 If all good so far, then this bit should work....
 fsockopen
 resource(4) of type (stream)
 int(0)
 string(0) ""

Given that we can't replicate your error we can't give a definitive answer what the problem is - but my guess would be that you haven't configure openSSL.