I used PHPMailer to send emails to a client's website user. SMTP host is smtp.gmail.com.

web was hosted on Bluehost. I found out that mailer was not working. I enabled verbose output and to my surprise I found out that Bluehost was intercepting my mail and responding with

220-We do not authorize the use of this system to transport unsolicited, 220 and/or bulk e-mail

when i was explicitly using smtp.gmail.com. Not only they were intercepting but also They were trying my credentials against its own smtp server and then showing me that authentication failed.

When i contacted chat they asked me to tell last 4 characters of Bluehost account password to verify ownership.

Dude do they have passwords in plaintext.🤔