Google offers an excellent free email service to website owners where they can use custom domain names (yourchoice@yourdomain.com) to offer full-fledged Gmail styled email service with personal customization's and branding to their users.

To use Google's SMTP servers for sending emails, webmasters must configure there servers and application/scripts to use it instead of the default SMTP server configured on the system. While configuring the same for this drupal blog using SMTP Authentication Support Module, the following errors were shown resulting in repeated failures.

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]:
unable to connect to ssl://smtp.gmail.com:465 (Connection timed out) in SMTP->Connect()

Drupal is an excellent open-source CMS but at the same time a bit harder to get hold off when things get bad without fairly advanced Drupal knowledge, recently I upgraded this blog from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 and after making the site live with upgrade the Drupal cron-job started failing as evident in the picture below (the cron is setupped to run every six hours but it failed to do so).

Strangely enough running cron manually showed a 404, Page Not Found error, having tried everything from fixing cron commands to playing with cron.php file-permissions finally I found the reason of failed cron-jobs by having look at 'Drupal Log' which was showing error 'Cron run exceeded the time limit and was aborted.'