SMTP connect() failed Cannot send mails from contat us form

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