Any way to check if Order Confirmation Emails are being created in Magento 2?

Question

Magento 2.4.2-p1
Porto theme
Amasty's SMTP Email Settings extension

We have the SMTP Email Settings extension from Amasty but it doesn't appear to be working. I had a ticket open with them forever but they are unable to resolve this and it seems like they don't really care.

From what I understand - there are 2 things that come into play:

1. Customer places an order and then the Order Confirmation Email is generated and placed into a queue somewhere?
2. The cron job then runs and pushes this to the mail server who sends the Email out based on the Amasty's SMTP Email Settings extension settings or Aschroder Email extension etc.

I am really really desperate right now as we really need to switch our old Magento site to the new but can't do that until Order Confirmation Emails will be sent out.

The hosting company claims this is NOT a problem on their side of things.

Here are my questions:

1. Is there a way to check if the Order Confirmation Emails are even being created?
2. How to test the cron job to make sure it works properly?
3. Should I just forget about the SMTP Email Settings extension from Amasty and install the Aschroder extension and try that instead?

Any suggestions on how to make this work would be greatly appreciated.

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UPDATED on September 6th:

Amasty has actually come back and says I cannot use different Email accounts in different scopes (different stores) which seems preposterous given that this worked with their extension in Magento 1.9.4 and I can't even understand how they would justify making customers send an Order Confirmation Email from a different domain than the store where customer placed the order?

But after changing everything (all the scopes) to the same Email address, it actually sent the Order Confirmation Email.

Answer 1

No idea if this might work for you, I am using the free Mageplaza SMTP extension which has Email logs built in. You can turn it on/off and decide how many days logs are being saved. With Google mail the extension works perfectly fine.

Answer 2

Another option to consider is using MailTrap.io ... You (essentially) set it up as an SMTP server (i.e. within Magento).

But, any/all emails generated - from Magento - are NOT relayed to the customer. Instead, it is stored on the MailTrap server and can be viewed via their Dashboard.

Thereby allowing you to visualize your Transactional & Marketing emails - as your customer(s) would see them.