Yeah I definitely searched here. It was a long time ago now though so I don’t recall exactly which posts I took advice from but the consensus I formed was that it should work. I found a variety of external articles on how to do it too, although I typically wouldn’t blindly follow such articles so I expect I would have combined a few different sources of advice before going ahead with the most appropriate solution for my circumstances. This had been all working just fine for around 9 months since the forum launched until the start of June.
Overall, it seemed as though for quantities of email that are higher than the free tiers of the commercial providers Google offered a good free option and was within their ToS. The sending limits were never going to work forever if the forum got very busy but I have always been far below them (2000 per day) so the “Too many login attempts” error has come as a surprise (and in fact doesn’t tally with the list of expected error messages on that Google limits page).
I can accept that for whatever potentially AI-blackbox reason they have decided to apply some other form of secret limit to the account (and be upset with them for the lack of notification, etc.) but ultimately I’m trying to be pragmatic in abandoning that service now and just want to get a better understanding of the impact the prolonged email deliverability delay will have on my forum when I switch provider to re-enable email.
If the technical answer is that Discourse should be creating all of these sidekiq jobs in the event of a prolonged email outage and that it will recover gracefully when given an opportunity, that’s cool - it just all seems a little out of the ordinary to me and I thought that at the very least the information might act as a useful data point about a particular failure mode.