POP3 polling and SMTP sending both suddenly failing

Product Support

AI-generated summary

JamesNorth reports that both POP3 polling and SMTP sending have suddenly failed on his Discourse forum, despite unchanged settings and continued functionality on another server. JammyDodger suggests enabling 2FA on the Gmail account and using an app password, which JamesNorth confirms resolved the POP3 issue. He now seeks help with the remaining SMTP timeout problem.

1

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:

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2

I think you now have to enable 2FA on your Google account, and set up an app password:

3

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

4

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!