Community Builder no longer sending emails

For a while now Community Builder has not been sending emails to people who sign up and the mass mailing function does not work. I get the following error message:

Error sending email: SMTP connect() failed. github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting

The SMTP settings are definitely correct and work when tested in Global Configuration. I am using ElasticEmail SMtP settings and the ElasticEmail Joomla plugin and component.

Sending emails from other components, eg Acymailing, also works properly.

Community Builder will send mass emails when global configuration is set to php mailer, but I need to use ElasticEmail

Your ElasticEmail plugin is for Joomla and not CB. They would need to design it to work with CB. Your SMTP settings are probably not valid for standard SMTP mailer usage. Enable debug mode and maximum error reporting in Joomla global configuration to see if any further error information is output to try and see why the connection fails.

Thanks for the reply.

Well, I'm confused now. Rather than exposing error reporting to the public, I thought I'd try on my development site. I made sure that the email settings were identical to the public site and sent a "mass mail" from CB to one of my own emails. It got through. There was no error message.

I then went back to the public website, enabled maximum error reporting and repeated the experiment. This time the mail wasn't sent, same error as before. No additional error message.

I enabled debugging, but have no idea what to make of the contents of the console.What should I be looking for and where?

I've no idea. The SMTP connection failed. This typically means the host, username, password, etc.. one of those parameters is configured wrong. Could also be the SMTP server blocking the email from sending from your domain. Ensure within CB > Registration > Configuration that the registration from email matches your domain or the SMTP domain as it could be trying to send emails from a domain you're not authorized to use (which would be email spoofing).

I've been doing more testing and getting mixed results. First I tried the alternative host/port configuration for ElasticEmail - using port 25 - and it worked! However, that situation didn't last and the same error messages came back. So I switched back to the port 2525 host name that wasn't working before and suddenly it is working. But for how long?

So it looks like ElasticEmail has intermittent problems with messages sent from CB via its relay service, so I guess my best plan is to raise this with them and see if they can figure it out. Perhaps they will have a record of the failed attempts.

In the meantime, perhaps I should switch to using PHPmailer.

Thanks for your help.