4.5.x: email shipping of the form-module is broken

[ChrisEbert]

After updating contao from 4.4.7 to 4.5.2 (PHP version is 7.1), mail delivery of the form-module (and newsletter-bundle) is broken.

I have a simple contact form, to send an email with the contents of the form fields after submitting the form.
After hitting submit, I'm redirected to the redirect-page but no email was sent.

This entry appears inside the System-Log:

Details: | Form "Kontakt" could not be sent: Expected response code 220 but got code "", with message ""
Funktion: | Contao\Form::processFormData

The log-files are empty. There is no special smtp-server configured.

I could not reproduce it for the contao demo, because it is still v4.4.8.

[aschempp]

Are you using Unix or Windows?

[xchs]

I was also able to reproduce the error (Linux host).

[ChrisEbert]

The issue appears on unix machines. Locally I'm using the php:7-apache docker image.

[aschempp]

So the background to my question is that we updated to Swiftmailer 6 in Contao 4.5, which does not longer support the PHP mail() method. It's either SMTP or Postfix sending. The best solution is probably to configure an SMTP server if you don't have one yet.

[ChrisEbert]

Ah ok. Sounds for me like a breaking change. Wouldn‘t it be bettet to do this in a major contao update?

[Toflar]

It's a security related change and it's not a break Contao introduced but Swiftmailer. We cannot stick with old versions forever, it would imply other issues.

[ChrisEbert]

Ok, I understand.

After using the STMP server for sending the emails, everything works as expected. 👍

If somebody else is having this issue, there is a nice (german) article on how to configure your own SMTP server in Contao 4 - https://contao.ninja/smtp-einstellungen.html

Thanks for your hard work guys!