I have a vanilla joomla installation using Digital Ocean’s one click app install. I installed RS form plugin to send emails from the contact us form.
However, when the user fills out the form he gets the message: “SMTP connect() failed”
A bit of background:
I tried to change the settings on joomla to send emails from my gmail.
Here are the mail settings of the configuration.php file:
Mail from: myname@gmail.com
mailer = smtp
sendmail = /usr/sbin/sendmail
fromname = myname
smtpuser: gmail username
smtp password: gmail password
smtp security: tls
SMTP Host: smtp.gmail.com
i can connect via ssh to the terminal of my droplet

after doing so and executing the telnet command:” telnet smtp.gmail.com 587” this is what I get:

myserver:~# telnet smtp.gmail.com 587
Trying 173.194.79.108...
Connected to gmail-smtp-msa.l.google.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
At least we can see that it is connecting.

As far as the mail logs goes here I've looked at them and only can see sender of joomla and not from myself

myserver:/var/log# ls -lhrt mail*
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 827 Jul 24 06:47 mail.log.4.gz
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 632 Jul 30 06:39 mail.log.3.gz
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 775 Aug 7 06:34 mail.log.2.gz
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 2.9K Nov 7 11:54 mail.log.1
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 0 Nov 8 06:51 mail.log
myserver:/var/log# grep joomla mail* | wc -l
18
myserver:/var/log# zgrep joomla mail* | wc -l
87
myserver:/var/log# grep myname mail* | wc -l
0
myserver:/var/log# zgrep myname mail* | wc -l
0
Any ideas on what may be the problem?

Thanks