I was just setting up SMTP authentication and when I tested it by trying to send a new password email to myself, I got an error saying it failed to send. I went to the modx error log to see what it said, but the error log wouldn’t load. It just sat there saying “Working…” So I checked it via SSH and found this:
/www/core/cache/logs $ cat error.log
[2026-03-05 21:35:36] (ERROR @ /www/core/src/Revolution/modUser.php : 959) Error while sending mail to [email protected]: SMTP connect() failed. https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting SMTP server error: QUIT command failed Detail: M
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/www/core/cache/logs $ PuTTYPuTTY
I have no idea what to make of this. Something about that machine language also causes the screen to jump up and leaves that PuTTYPuTTY in the command prompt as well. Very weird.
Edit:
I discovered that setting mail_smtp_secure to ssl instead of tls causes the machine language and subsequent inability to load the error log to go away.
Your email-address is in the error message. So you might want to edit the post, to remove it.
I have no idea why the error outputs “machine language” though.
It looks like whatever the PHPMailer (an external library) returns in the “ErrorInfo” ($mail->mailer->ErrorInfo) just gets appended to the error message for the MODX error log.
