The alpha version of Joomla 3.2.0 is now available.  As usual, it is easy to install and it has new features.  

There was something I had wanted to test for some time: Gmail as the SMTP server. The Joomla documentation has instructions how to configure the mail settings but when I first tried it, the connection failed. I decided to configure the good old Telnet into my Windows machine so that I could test the SMTP connection manually. The TCP port 465 of the Gmail server responded, therefore the problem was somewhere else.

It occurred to me that I had started to use Google's 2-step authentication because I accessed Gmail from my Nokia Lumia phone. After the 2-step authentication was turned off, the problem disappeared and my WAMP server was able to send emails.

The 2-step authentication is an important security measure. When it was turned back on, I had to add a new password in the Gmail account settings and use that password as the application specific password in Joomla. The interesting thing was to realise that even though Google's instructions mention that the validity of the password does not depend on the blank spaces between the groups of four characters in the password, it actually did.  After the spaces were removed, the SMTP connection worked.

The instructions at https://docs.joomla.org have now been updated, based on these test results.