Cant get grafana to email alerts using gmail

grafana version 4.6.2

I have the following in grafana.ini

[smtp]
enabled = true
host =smtp.gmail.com:465
user =xxx@xxx
password =xxxxxx
from_address =xxx@xxx
from_name =Grafana

the email address is my gmail address and the password id the gmail password. In the grafana logs I see the following

t=2017-12-08T22:34:10+0800 lvl=info msg=“Sending notification” logger=alerting.notifier type=email id=0 isDefault=false
t=2017-12-08T22:34:10+0800 lvl=info msg=“Sending alert notification to” logger=alerting.notifier.email addresses=[xxx@xxx]
t=2017-12-08T22:34:12+0800 lvl=eror msg=“Failed to send alert notification email” logger=alerting.notifier.email error="unencrypted connection"
t=2017-12-08T22:34:12+0800 lvl=eror msg=“Failed to send alert notifications” logger=context userId=1 orgId=1 uname=admin error=“unencrypted connection”

I suspect the cause is the error=“unencrypted connection” as I couldnt find any options in grafana to handle tls. Is there something I’m missing here or can grafana only handle plain text in which case I’ll have to setup a mail proxy.

Duplicate of Gmail for notifications. Please use the search functionality before posting new topics. Thanks