wp mail not working sent me on a wild goose chase - maybe this will help someone

[emp]

Long story short:

Error
Contact form stopped sending one day to the other.

Testing
WP mail gave no error
php mail() was sending no prob.

Error source found
After a few hours of chase, I found that some system process had set permissions on class-phpmailer.php to absolute zero.

Set rights back - all good.

What a night.

::emp::