SMTP Mandrill Port 587 Connection Timed out

Question

I have an app that send some notification e-mails for myself using Mandrillapp's SMTP server. It works fine on my localhost/development, but in DigitalOcean's Droplet I get an PHP exception telling me that the connection have timed out.

Using Netcat I would be able to confirm this:

nc: connect to smtp.mandrillapp.com port 587 (tcp) failed: Connection timed out

It's possible to have this working on DigitalOcean or I need to do something else to send e-mails?

Thank you!

Droplet: Ubuntu 14.04 (LAMP Stack)

Answer 1

In order to curb spam and abuse, some new user accounts at DigitalOcean have their SMTP ports blocked by default. Unfortunately there are sometimes false positives. It sounds like this might have been the case for you. If you open a support ticket, the team would be happy to remove that block for you.

Full-disclosure, among other things, I'm a Community Manager at Digitalocean