No it’s right, it was working until 3 days ago for the past few months and it start working again after I restarted the server (just rebooted linux). I haven’t made a single change.
The bugs however remain, see my points 2 and 3 above. The problem is it’s trying to login before sending each email (which now has hundreds of backlogged emails because for some reason the emails stopped being sent a few days ago). So after sending about 30 emails or so the SMTP server blocks it because it re logs in before sending each email. Now I have to manually stop the discourse server, wait for 10 minutes and then restart it and then again it sends 30 emails and logs in 30 times and then again the smtp server blocks it for too many logins.
This isn’t correct, it should reuse an existing login to send emails and it should backoff if the smtp server responds with too many logins and report it to the administrator.
Plus there is the other issue of why it didn’t inform the admin that emails are not being sent. I think the email component/engine would have just stopped after an web upgrade causing all the emails to queue up and when I rebooted the machine it started sending them. There are no errors in the logs files at all until after the reboot when the smtp server pushed back after too many logins.