CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

When I try to run the bounce handling, all I get is 'unable to connect' which is fairly unhelpful. What can I do to diagnose this?

I've triple checked all the settings for our gmail account, I've checked the firewall settings with the server guys and they reckon they aren't blocking outgoing traffic so I should be able to access the gmail servers. I'm at a loss as to what I check next

Name default
Server   imap.gmail.com
Username   xxx@gmail.com
Password        (triple checked against gmail account)
Localpart   xxx+
Email Domain  gmail.com
Return-Path   (empty)
Protocol IMAP
Source   (empty)
Use SSL?   Y
Used For?    Bounce Processing

(with actual email replaced by xxx)

Error is:
Parameters parsed (and passed to API method):
a:1:{s:7:"version";i:3;}

Full message:
Finished execution of Fetch Bounces with result: Failure, Error message: A fatal error was triggered: Could not connect to MailStore
Error message:

An error occured while sending or receiving mail. Failed to connect to the server: imap.gmail.com:993.

You can use google apps domain names (ie. your own domain name with google webmail), but it will not work very well if you use an email @gmail

It's because civicrm will need to send the emails as yourname@gmail.com from your own smtp server (likely the box that runs your civicrm) and google has only whitelisted their own servers as being able to send emails as gmail.com (SPF records) so most of the mail servers will ignore your emails as spam.

X+

The way it works is that civimail use the bounce email as the sender at the technical level (SMTP envelope).

For references: please do NOT use a gmail address for the bounces, it won't work (a google app email is fine however).

The reason is you do that and use your mail() or local mailer, you are trying to send an email from your civicrm server as being from gmail email, something that google said is not allowed (SPF record).

and if you do use google smtp as mail servers, they will prevent you to send too many emails (the too many is going to be changed over time, but is pretty much guaranteed to be above the number of emails you want to send)