Mailgun (SMTP) + Craft

Question

I'm trying to set Mailgun up on Craft (Like we've done plenty of times before) but each time it keeps saying that the connection to SMTP is failing.

The error I'm getting is:

2017/03/29 09:54:13 [error] [application] Email error: SMTP Error: Could not authenticate.

I've checked https://craftcms.com/support/troubleshooting-email-errors#dealing-with-errors and error description is:

“Use SMTP authentication” was checked, but the credentials were incorrect.

But I've double checked these details over 10x now and they are 100% correct.

Is there any other reason this could fail? We're using port 587 and tried other ports but no success. Even opening these ports on the server doesn't connect.

Where would the problem be... Craft, Mailgun or Server?

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 29 '17 at 15:08

5

Craft is just passing on the error message it gets back when trying to connect with whatever settings it was given.

And we're using Mailgun ourselves (port 587) for sending emails on https://craftcms.com, which is a Craft install.

Make sure you're using smtp.mailgun.org as the host and that you've got the transport type set to TLS as well.

answered Mar 29 '17 at 15:08

Brad Bell

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Do I need to change any settings for the TLS to work in MailGun? I did think it was a connection issue though. – Jason Mayo Mar 29 '17 at 15:25
I don't recall us having to change anything at all. – Brad Bell Mar 29 '17 at 21:07

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 11 '17 at 14:43

So it turns out this was a server issue due to cPanel... A few solutions for people may run in to this in future...

Set email settings to remote on server
Update MX entries on server
Add postmaster@ and site@ mailboxes via cPanel
Added this to EXIM config - https://grepitout.com/configure-mailgun-cpanel-exim/

As well as this:

This will likely be being caused by a cPanel configuration item which redirects outbound traffic on SMTP ports from non-root users back to localhost.

So, when attempting to connect to smtp.mailgun.org, you are silently redirected to 127.0.0.1, which then fails to authenticate.

This is uaually used in shared hosting environment to limit the impact of compromised scripts sending out SPAM on the server.

I've disabled this in WHM > Server Configuration > Tweak Settings > Mail > "Restrict outgoing SMTP to root, exim, and mailman (FKA SMTP Tweak)" and setting this to "Off".

Fixed! :)

Mailgun (SMTP) + Craft

2 Answers2