Sending email to Gmail and A2Hosting

Hello everyone, I need to implement a contact form on the website which is built using Laravel. So everything worked fine until I switched to send emails to the dedicated Gmail account.

After plenty of research how to send emails to the Gmail I have done next:

1. Two factor authorization turned OFF.
2. POP3/IMAP enabled.
3. Allow less secure apps turned ON.
4. DisplayUnlockCaptcha Account Access Enabled.

Configuration .env file setup:

MAIL_DRIVER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=smtp.gmail.com
MAIL_PORT=465
[email protected]
MAIL_PASSWORD=mypassword
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=ssl

After that, I faced “Connection could not be established with host smtp.gmail.com” problem and I solved it by adding next in config/mail.php:

   'stream' => [
        'ssl' => [
            'verify_peer' => false,
            'verify_peer_name' => false,
            'allow_self_signed' => true,
        ],
    ],

After that, I faced: “Failed to authenticate on SMTP server with username "[email protected]" using 2 possible authenticators. Authenticator LOGIN returned Swift_TransportException: Expected response code 235 but got code "535", with message "535 Incorrect authentication data ‘’ in…” problem and I have no idea how to solve it.

For testing purpose I made one email account on my hosting ex. [email protected] and when I replace that informations in .env file like this:

MAIL_DRIVER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=smtp.gmail.com
MAIL_PORT=465
[email protected]
MAIL_PASSWORD=myhostingaccountpassword
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=ssl

Email was not sent to [email protected] probably because wrong MAIL_HOST but there is no “Failed to authenticate on SMTP server…” error and my own “Message successfully sent” message showing up.

So, if [email protected] works (not showing any erorrs) and [email protected] does not work (showing auth error), I think that the problem is actually in my domain/hosting configuration. To be precise, whatever I type in MAIL_HOST at the end it will hit hosting mail exchange host and not smtp.gmail.com.

Of course I cleared config cache every time I changed config or .env files. I have never used the MailGun service so I will rather avoid it for this small project also.

The application is hosted on A2Hosting. Do I need to change some kind of MX records for specific domain or what else I can do in cPanel to make this works?

Any help and other suggestions are more than welcome!