Hey Folks, I have a strange issue here and wonder if someone’s random brainstorm might help me solve it! For several years I’ve run a Discourse forum with no issues. Suddenly in the last few days I’ve had errors in my Dashboard (and logs of course) showing that the Gmail POP3 password is failing (it’s been working for about 2 years and hasn’t changed) and also the SMTP connection to my paid delivery service (Postmark) is offering up a TCP Timeout (5 seconds?). Again the settings baked in from the yml file have not changed at the server. I also POP in to this Gmail account and send mail through Postmark on another Wordpress server and it’s working perfectly well from that second host machine (which has a different IP but is in the same datacenter) … ergo Gmail and Postmark seem fine. I can’t send a test message from Discourse either. To reiterate - this is not a new install with possible typos etc - it’s been working great for a few years with these settings. And I’m on latest here at this time. Any tips? :grimacing: [Screen Shot 2022-07-04 at 5.27.31 pm]

I think you now have to enable 2FA on your Google account, and set up an app password: [image] Connection to the POP3 server is failing with an authentication error. Please check your POP3 settings Support I recommend turning on 2FA on the account and setting up an App Password for Discourse. The policy change is about the “allow less secure app access” option being deprecated. More info on this here:

To confirm this solved my Gmail issue - just enabled 2FA and created a 16 character app password. Now just gotta figure out the weird SMTP timeout stuff!

POP3 polling and SMTP sending both suddenly failing

Product Support

JamesNorth (James North) July 4, 2022, 7:37am 3

Awesome thanks @JammyDodger - I’ll get onto that for the POP side of things.

Topic		Replies	Views
Troubleshooting Gmail 'Poll via POP3 for email replies' Product Support	6	4205	May 1, 2017
Connection to the POP3 server is failing with an authentication error. Please check your POP3 settings. (revisited) Product Support	1	113	June 10, 2026
Gmail POP3 needs an app password nowadays Product Support	1	1037	June 9, 2022
Connection to the POP3 server is failing with an authentication error. Please check your POP3 settings Product Support	5	4570	June 26, 2022
Starting new topics by email - Job exception: execution expired Product Support	4	2320	March 30, 2016

POP3 polling and SMTP sending both suddenly failing

Related topics