Laravel SMTP sending email by queue receiving empty response - laravel

Question

I'm running Laravel 6.20.0 and I'm experiencing the following error since yesterday when my queue worker is trying to send an email:
Swift_TransportException: Expected response code 250 but got an empty response in public_html/vendor/swiftmailer/swiftmailer/lib/classes/Swift/Transport/AbstractSmtpTransport.php:448
I've tried requeuing my emails several times now since yesterday, but I keep on receiving the same error when it attempts to send. This worked flawlessly before for almost a year, so I'm a bit confused what is causing this issue. I haven't changed any credentials nor changed any code or configuration recently.
My mail settings are as follows:
MAIL_DRIVER=smtp
MAIL_HOST="smtp-relay.gmail.com"
MAIL_PORT=587
MAIL_USERNAME="my#user.name"
MAIL_PASSWORD="myapppassword"
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=tls
MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS="my#from.address"
MAIL_FROM_NAME="My Name"
I've doubled checked in my Google Admin that both the IPv4 address as well as the IPv6 address of my server are whitelisted and the SMTP relay service is enabled. I also created a new App password within my Google account to see if that would fix the problem - but no luck there.
I've also cleared the config cache (and have tried php artisan config:cache) and tried restarting supervisor which runs the worker running the task for the email queue. I've also tried requeueing the emails one by one in case I triggered some kind of throttling, but to no avail. By no means is my website sending many emails, about a 100 a month, well within the limits posed by my email account. (And I currently got <10 stuck in queue.)
As a last resort I turned off SMTP verification and TLS encryption in the Google Admin, so the only requirement for using the SMTP was having the IP address whitelisted (which it is). But this didn't work either, so I've switched SMTP verification and TLS encryption back on again as a requirement.
Finally; I ran a composer update, but that didn't fix the problem either.
I've found some other older threads on Stackoverflow with a similar problem, but I had already tried all offered solutions as described above.
What am I missing?

Answer 1

i think you need change mail port to 25 like this :
MAIL_PORT=25

Answer 2

Just faced same issue.
In my case SMTP sending worked when I tried to send an email without queues.
But when I tried to send same email with same config using queue, I got error that looks like:
[2021-02-15 12:43:24] local.ERROR: Expected response code 250 but got an empty response {"exception":"[object] (Swift_TransportException(code: 0): Expected response code 250 but got an empty response at /app/vendor/swiftmailer/swiftmailer/lib/classes/Swift/Transport/AbstractSmtpTransport.php:448)
[stacktrace]
#0 /app/vendor/swiftmailer/swiftmailer/lib/classes/Swift/Transport/AbstractSmtpTransport.php(345): Swift_Transport_AbstractSmtpTransport->assertResponseCode('', Array)
#1 /app/vendor/swiftmailer/swiftmailer/lib/classes/Swift/Transport/EsmtpTransport.php(305): Swift_Transport_AbstractSmtpTransport->executeCommand('HELO [127.0.0.1...', Array, Array, false, NULL)
#2 /app/vendor/swiftmailer/swiftmailer/lib/classes/Swift/Transport/AbstractSmtpTransport.php(368): Swift_Transport_EsmtpTransport->executeCommand('HELO [127.0.0.1...', Array)
#3 /app/vendor/swiftmailer/swiftmailer/lib/classes/Swift/Transport/EsmtpTransport.php(341): Swift_Transport_AbstractSmtpTransport->doHeloCommand()
#4 /app/vendor/swiftmailer/swiftmailer/lib/classes/Swift/Transport/AbstractSmtpTransport.php(148): Swift_Transport_EsmtpTransport->doHeloCommand()
After long research I've found that issue is related with HELO command itself.
As you can clearly see in the log, for some reason (probably server hostname) there is 127.0.0.1 IP address, which Google is blocking.
How I resolved that:
So to resolve that, I've added one little line in my artisan file:
$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] = 'mydomain.com';
So my artisan file looks like this now:
#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php
$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] = 'mydomain.com';
define('LARAVEL_START', microtime(true));
...

Answer 3

Spoke with Google Workspace rep
As a temporary solution they asked to use
smtp.gmail.com instead of smtp-relay.gmail.com
Worked on 2 of our projects.
P.S. The limit is 130 emails per account on Workspace (former Gsuite)
for example if you have 5 users, 5x130=650
What the rep said haha :)