Unable to connect any mail account

[evble]

Hi,
we are currently in the midst of a data collection, and everything was functioning smoothly up until 05.11.2025. Since then, emails are no longer being sent to participants (without any changes being made to the run), and I am unable to connect any mail account. I have tried various accounts—university addresses, gmail and outlook accounts—I always get the error: "SMTP connect() failed." I have also tried it with different servers (formr.org, formr.leipzig.org) and get the same error.

I have seen the post #598 but this seems to be different since no email accounts whatsoever are working.

Has anyone else experienced this issue or might have suggestions on how to resolve it?

Best,
Eva

[rubenarslan]

I can send emails fine from the Leipzig formr instance. Gmail and Outlook usually do not work, because they prevent automated sending, so it may still be something wrong with your email account. 8 times out of 10 someone changed/expired the password and forgot to tell you to. 1 time the SSL certificates of the mail server changed. What error message do you get?

[evble]

Hi Ruben, thanks for your quick reply!
I checked with the technical services of Uni Hamburg and they confirmed that the certificates were changed mid-November. They told me that the problem is likely on the server side, namely that the hosting server does not validate the new certificate chain as trustworthy and rejects the connection.
They said: "Nach unserer Meinung fehlt auf dem Server das Wurzelzertifikat zum Prüfen der TLS-Verbindung. Bitte sprechen Sie mit dem Administrator des Servers. Es muss das folgende Wurzelzertifikat dort vorhanden sein:
Hellenic Academic and Reserach Institutions CA
HARICA TLS RSA Root CA 2021"

The full error message I get is: "Account Test Failed: SMTP connect() failed. https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/TroubleshootingSMTP server error: QUIT command failed"

[rubenarslan]

Hi, I updated the server to know this more recent certificate. Please check if it works now.

[evble]

It works perfectly now, thanks so much!