[resolved] Odd Authentication Errors with Gmail SMTP

Kusmer

Hi OSTicket Community,

We are having some unusual troubles with OSTicket posting through Gmail SMTP. I've done a lot of Googling but haven't found any recent answers.

Everything seems to be mostly working. OSTicket can read and post emails through Gmail SMTP. But there are two symptoms that are weird.

Starting on August 26, 2020, the OSTicket Admin Panel Dashboard shows hundreds of the following Mailer Errors.

Mailer Error
Unable to email via SMTP:ssl://smtp.gmail.com:465 [support@MYDOMAIN.com] Failed to set sender: support@MYDOMAIN.com [SMTP: Invalid response code received from server (code: 530, response: 5.7.0 Authentication Required. Learn more at 5.7.0 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=WantAuthError 184sm6646630qkl.104 - gsmtp)]

The other symptom is that any outgoing emails originating from OSTicket are no longer stored in Gmail. (We used to be able to go to the Sent label in Gmail and see every email sent by OSTicket.) We use our Gmail account to search for past tickets, which is better for us than the OSTicket search function (sorry), but since August 26 they are no longer stored.

osTicket Version v1.12 (a076918) — Up to date
Web Server Software Apache
MySQL Version 5.5.30
PHP Version 7.0.33

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Steve

ntozier

1.12 is really old and you should at least upgrade to 1.12.6, or even better the current stable 1.14.3.

Once you do that I would say retest the email.

KevinTheJedi

@Kusmer

Authentication Required typically means you either don't have auth enabled for SMTP, the username/password is incorrect, or you have 2-Factor auth enabled and you need to follow Google Documentation to configure an app password.

The sent emails are not being stored on the Gmail server because authentication is failing and now the backup PHPMailer is sending the emails on your behalf. Once you resolve the auth errors you should be able to see them in the Sent folder again.

Cheers.

Kusmer

Hi ntozier and KevinTheJedi,

Thanks for your replies. I have solved the issue, so I thought I'd describe the solution for other OSTicket users.

The issue was that G Suite Gmail no longer let me send SMTP emails from our support email address. It would fetch them fine, but authentication would fail.

I upgraded to 1.14.3, but that didn't solve the issue.

Kevin's explanation that OSTicket was using the PHP mailer helped focus me on on the Gmail issue, which started on August 26, 2020.

For background, our support team all logs into the Gmail account to do searches. So we each were using the support email address's password. We did not have 2 factor authentication turned on for this account, because this would not allow us to log into the Gmail account.

We were also using the support email address's password for OSTicket. What changed on August 26 is that Gmail's security practices didn't like this any longer. Presumably because our support team and OSTicket were using the same password from different locations, Gmail was starting to balk. The clear solution was that we needed to use an app password.

But Gmail has also changed practices such that 2 factor authentication must be turned on to allow the Gmail account to create an app password. We were stuck.

It turns out Gmail has an elegant solution for allowing multiple people to use the same gmail account, and it is called "Mail delegation". Once the capability is turned on by an administrator in G Suite, we could add each of our support team's email addresses to be allowed to manage the support Gmail account. This means the support team no longer requires the support email address Gmail password.

We then turned on 2 factor authentication, generated an app password, entered it into the OSTicket Email section, and now everything works.

And we're updated to the latest OSTicket.

Thanks for your help, and for building great software.

Best,

Steve

ntozier

Glad to hear that you got this resolved. I'll mark this as resolved and close the thread.
Please start a new thread if you have a new question / issue / etc.