Mail merge emails , googlemail - not working

I used to be able to do this - I try again every so often and give up…
I have turned on access for less secure apps/told google its me - and it seems happy.
Tried several settings - this email is actual a googlemail and by changing the SMTP server to googlemail rather than gmail I can now get the test connection working -

But when I try and send the emails I get this error message for each email and it doesn’t send

<class ‘smtplib.SMTPServerDisconnected’>: please run connect() first, traceback follows
File “C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program\mailmerge.py”, line 288, in sendMailMessage
self.server.sendmail(sendermail, truerecipients, msg.as_string())
File “C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program\python-core-3.5.7\lib\smtplib.py”, line 848, in sendmail
self.ehlo_or_helo_if_needed()
File “C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program\python-core-3.5.7\lib\smtplib.py”, line 600, in ehlo_or_helo_if_needed
if not (200 <= self.ehlo()[0] <= 299):
File “C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program\python-core-3.5.7\lib\smtplib.py”, line 440, in ehlo
self.putcmd(self.ehlo_msg, name or self.local_hostname)
File “C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program\python-core-3.5.7\lib\smtplib.py”, line 367, in putcmd
self.send(str)
File “C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program\python-core-3.5.7\lib\smtplib.py”, line 359, in send
raise SMTPServerDisconnected(‘please run connect() first’)

I’ve read the similar question (Can't make email connection doing a Mail Merge in Writer) and don’t really understand - where/how to change the code? Do I still need to?

About to revert to sending individual emails with pdf attachments … which I find really frustrating cos I know how much quicker/easier it was when it worked.

Info about LO version
Version: 6.2.5.2 (x64)
Build ID: 1ec314fa52f458adc18c4f025c545a4e8b22c159
CPU threads: 4; OS: Windows 10.0; UI render: default; VCL: win;
Locale: en-GB (en_GB); UI-Language: en-US
Calc: threaded