The problem was that the proposed script demands a user authentication but since the server does not require it, the whole script was unnecessary in that form. NO AUTHENTICATION IS REQUIRED FOR LOCAL EMAIL SUBMISSIONS.

In my opinion the example in the settings.php is just that an example of how to set the correct settings for your specific smtp server.

There are links to the documentation which should help you to figure out which settings are necessary for your case.

If you think this could be better documented please let us know how we can do that.

@Peter Jaramillo

https://elgg.org/discussion/view/3300132/laminasmailprotocolexceptionruntimeexception-error

https://elgg.org/discussion/view/3050485/emails-not-being-sent

https://elgg.org/discussion/view/3060652/php-can-send-email-but-elgg-site-cannot
https://elgg.org/discussion/view/2952483/php-mailer-its-not-working-reflecting-error

Any 3rd-party plugins activated?

Try this via console

chown -R www-data:www-data /Users/folder1/data-dirs/folder2/

chmod -R 750 /Users/folder1/data-dirs/folder2/

where:

www-data - server user

/Users/folder1/data-dirs/folder2/ - path to your data directory

Then login as admin and run Upgrade via Dashboard

It turned out that both were accidentally turned off on the plugins-page <blush>. How, touch-screen-touches, I guess.

Much thanks to Nikolai for your generous help.

Any example to understand what you want to do?

There is the 'sanitize, input' event http://learn.elgg.org/en/stable/guides/events-list.html#system-events

this will allow you to change the input.

Also there are some 'htmlawed' events http://learn.elgg.org/en/stable/guides/events-list.html#views to allow you to customize the rules of htmlawed.

I can't reproduce it. Check your server's error log.