Email won't send under specific circustances

Hi, fresh invoice ninja install, migrated server (from ubuntu 16.04 to ubuntu 18.04). I did mysqldumb first, then erased everything, fresh install with json import, to see if that was the problem.

I have configured a local version of phantomJS, and attach pdf to email. Everything works great.

But, if I apply the white label license, then the email won’t send. The web interface will still tell me that everything is fine, that the email was successfully sent, and I receive the email telling me that the invoice was successfully sent. However, the invoice email wasn’t sent. Ticking off the option to attach pdf doesn’t change anything.

Strangly enough, if I send it with the default email template, then it works again.

Did fresh install twice to test this behavior.

Here is the content of laravael-error.log

[2019-08-08 05:28:37] production.ERROR: ***Doctrine\DBAL\Driver\PDOException*** [1045] : /var$
[2019-08-08 05:28:37] production.ERROR: ***Doctrine\DBAL\Driver\PDOException*** [1045] : /var$
[2019-08-08 05:28:37] production.ERROR: ***Doctrine\DBAL\Driver\PDOException*** [1045] : /var$
[2019-08-08 05:28:37] production.ERROR: ***Doctrine\DBAL\Driver\PDOException*** [1045] : /var$
[2019-08-08 05:28:42] production.ERROR: ***Doctrine\DBAL\Driver\PDOException*** [1045] : /var$
[2019-08-08 05:29:47] production.ERROR: ***Doctrine\DBAL\Driver\PDOException*** [1045] : /var$
[2019-08-08 05:29:54] production.ERROR: ***Doctrine\DBAL\Driver\PDOException*** [1045] : /var$

However, trying to send new email doesn’t update the content of the log in any way.

I’ve tried :

sudo php artisan config:cache
sudo php artisan config:clear

Changing the config/app.php and config/database.php values to mimic the .env values

here is php -m result, if that helps :

[PHP Modules]
calendar
Core
ctype
curl
date
exif
fileinfo
filter
ftp
gettext
hash
iconv
json
libxml
mysqli
mysqlnd
openssl
pcntl
pcre
PDO
pdo_mysql
Phar
posix
readline
Reflection
session
shmop
sockets
sodium
SPL
standard
sysvmsg
sysvsem
sysvshm
tokenizer
Zend OPcache
zlib

[Zend Modules]
Zend OPcache

Is there more to the error, it looks like it may be cut off?