Email notification to Gmail account fails on Windows 10

Alan, welcome to these user forums.

Unfortunately, this problem seems to be very difficult to pin down as it seems to be specific to individual user Gmail accounts where this works for some and not for others even though using the same settings etc.

I can only suggest to use an alternative email provider such as Outlook.com or Comcast if you know that these will work.  This is happening for users on ATIH 2016 as well plus there have been reports from the 2017 Beta users too.

Personally this works fine for me with Gmail, Outlook.com and my private ISP (1and1) so remains a mystery why not for others!

Some additional information.

I tried her Gmail account on my Windows  7 system with the same version of Acronis and it works.

I may have to go to her backup account which seems to work (1and1) to send the message to her Gmail account if that combination works. I use 1and1 myself as my primary email server.

I would hope Acronis would solve this soon as it sounds like a common problem and Gmail is a huge email provider. I wonder if they are seeing the problem with any other email providers?

Alan, the main issue here is that this problem only really seems to be reported for Gmail and then this is not consistent to prove that this is being caused by a bug in the Acronis product, as you yourself have shown in your last post where using the same version of Acronis on Windows 7 works for you!

The key issue with the Acronis products is the use of a very old version of SSL which Gmail and other providers have now closed the door on, hence why it is now necessary to have to use TLS / port 587.  It seems to me that this is a design point in all of the current Acronis True Image versions which there is little desire to provide a fix for, especially for older, unsupported versions.

Please submit Feedback to the Acronis development team via the tool in the GUI Help section with a reference to this thread - the more users who raise this, perhaps the priority of this issue may be raised!

I submitted a note referencing this post as requested via the help option in the product.

Thanks for clearing up what the problem is for me. It surprises me.

I had Acronis working on two PCs with email notifications going to a GMAIL account working fine.  Around June 2016 they both stopped and I believe it was due to gmail dropping support for SSLv3.  I tried switching Acronis to TLS / port 587 but that would not work.  I tried going to an Outlook account using TLS /port 587 and that worked.  It took awhile to get the SMTP server name as most sites would follow the format "SMTP.outlook.com" but the Outlook I'm using was "smtp-mail.outlook.com".  Of course the ripple affect to this was having to go back to email clients and setups to pull email from both accounts (gmail and outlook).

I didn't try deleting the Acronis backup and re-creating it from scratch so it may have worked with TLS / port 587 and if I had thought about that apporach, I probably would have started with that.

This burned up a lot of time so I hope this saves someone else time.

Hi Paul,

Are you suggesting than deleting the Acronis backup and re-creating it from scratch did fix the Gmail notification problem on Windows 10?

I tried that and it didn't work for me... The same build of Acronis True Image 2015 works fine for email notification on a Windows 7 computer on the same network with the same settings (TLS pourt 587).

Thank's for your input!

I installed Acronisa 2017 and it appeared to fix the problem on Windows 10 and seems to work okay on Windows 7. I was also having problems with intermittant backup job failures and so far no problems.

Hi Francois,

Re-creating the backups did not fix the GMAIL issue.  My fix was to use an Outlook email account and that worked.

Hi Alan,

So that would mean that the issue was in the Acronis code.  I'm loathe to purchase another version of Acronis since they don't fix bugs in the older releases and want you to purchase a newer version.  I switched to EaseUS and it just works.  I also keep using my Acronis 2015 version but when it breaks I'm done with Acronis.  A once fine product/company killed by greed.

I would take a different view on this. With this type of software and especially with the Gmail bug it may not be that easy to fix it in older releases. Fixing the problem might introduce other compatibility issues and in reality this was created by Gmail changes and I am no fan of Gmail.

My belief on this type of software is that you should upgrade it at least every other release due to changes outside their control. Backup software can be mission critical.

My criticsm is that they didn't announce the bug and say when it was going to be fixed so the solution was easy to find.

I understand your perspective but EaseUS went through the same change of Gmail and it just continued to work so I doubt that this was a hard to fix issue.  It wasn't this one problem that has turned me off to Acronis.  I have had other issues and their support policy of having to pay them to report a bug in their software is a real negative.  I was a real early user of Acronis and each release brought more bugs with less features.

Paul, beginning with TI 2016 free support has been extended significantly List of Support Options for Acronis Products | Knowledge Base

Thank you Paul for the precision.

The key issue with Email notifications was with the version of SSL being used by Acronis which is considered to be obsolete and therefore vulnerable, hence Google have tightened up their support for SSL to refuse that older version as identified by the handshake information exchanged.

In terms of Acronis making changes to their products, then they will only do so for those products which have not already reached their End of Support date, which is pretty much the same as the majority (if not all) of other software vendors do with their EOL products.

There is a workaround for the SSL issue which put simply is to use TLS with port 587 instead which works fine in most cases.  

I tried TLS with port 587 with Gmail and that didn't work so I gave up and used my Outlook mail with TLS with port 587 which did work.  This was based on a post from Steve Smith where he indicated some Gmail accounts would work and some would not.  I guess I drew one that didn't.  I understand EOL for software having worked in the business for 35 years but most companies will support the current version and 1 or 2 versions back.  Acronis comes out with a new release each year and quickly EOL the prior years.  I don't mind buying new versions but I dislike being forced to buy it every year to get bug fixes.  My displeasure at the time was probably due to another issue where my scheduled jobs just quit working and the only fix (after considerable time) was to delete the backup plan and re-enter everything.  I had a long positive relationship with Acronis backup but I saw a noticeable  change in their product and support.

Paul, I am sure that the other MVP's as well as myself understand your displeasure when some bugs go unfixed unless you upgrade to a later version of the product, and sometimes, just promised in an as yet unannounced update etc.

Acronis as a company has a stated objective of selling products in order to turn a profit and generate returns for their share holders, so they have to prioritise where they will invest their time and income - thus EOL / EOS tends to be applied fairly strictly.

MY ISP stopped providing email service so I switched to GMAIL.  I have ATI 2021 running on WIN10 Pro.  My backup notifications worked fine until my change to GMAIL--ARGH. My error message is that ATI "failed to send the test message."

I realize ATI 2021 has reached EOL status. 

If I upgrade to the newest version of ATI will it work with GMAIL?

Leroy, the issue with Gmail is with their end rather than with Acronis.

See forum topic here for how to get this working.

Thank you, Steve, I have tried that fix but had no success.  

See also:

KB 57875: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, Acronis True Image: E-mail Notifications to Gmail Fail with "Authentication failed"

Webpage: Less secure apps & your Google Account