PHPMailer sends with TLS even when encryption is not enabled

Question

I am trying sending email using PHPMailer without TLS, but PHPMailer still tries to send email with TLS even if I do not enable it:

include_once("PHPMailer-master\PHPMailerAutoload.php");

$To = '[email protected]';
$Subject = 'Topic';
$Message = 'msg test';

$Host = 'site.com.br';
$Username = '[email protected]';
$Password = 'pass';
$Port = "587";

$mail = new PHPMailer();
$body = $Message;
$mail->IsSMTP(); // telling the class to use SMTP
$mail->Host = $Host; // SMTP server
$mail->SMTPDebug = 1; // enables SMTP debug information (for testing)
// 1 = errors and messages
// 2 = messages only
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // enable SMTP authentication
//$mail->SMTPSecure = 'ssl'; //or tsl -> switched off
$mail->Port = $Port; // set the SMTP port for the service server
$mail->Username = $Username; // account username
$mail->Password = $Password; // account password

$mail->SetFrom($Username);
$mail->Subject = $Subject;
$mail->MsgHTML($Message);
$mail->AddAddress($To);

if(!$mail->Send()) {
    $mensagemRetorno = 'Error: '. print($mail->ErrorInfo);
    echo $mensagemRetorno;
} else {
    $mensagemRetorno = 'E-mail sent!';
    echo $mensagemRetorno;
}

After send email, I got this message:

2016-09-01 21:08:55 CLIENT -> SERVER: EHLO www.johnmendes.com.br
2016-09-01 21:08:55 CLIENT -> SERVER: STARTTLS
2016-09-01 21:08:55 SMTP ERROR: STARTTLS command failed: 454 TLS not available due to temporary reason
2016-09-01 21:08:55 SMTP Error: Could not connect to SMTP host.
2016-09-01 21:08:55 CLIENT -> SERVER: QUIT
2016-09-01 21:08:55 SMTP connect() failed. https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting
SMTP connect() failed. https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting
Erro ao enviar e-mail: 1

The server doesn't support ssl or tls.

Any idea?

Answer 1

This is covered in the PHPMailer docs. PHPMailer does opportunistic TLS - if the server advertises that it can do TLS (which yours does), it will use it automatically without you asking. You can disable this:

$mail->SMTPSecure = false;
$mail->SMTPAutoTLS = false;

From the error message, it looks like this is a temporary problem on your hosting provider. You would see more info if you set $mail->SMTPDebug = 2;.

I can see you've based your code on an obsolete example, so make sure you have the latest version of PHPMailer and base your code on the examples supplied with it.