PHPMailer Software caused connection abort - php

Question

I am trying to send emails from a local XAMPP instance on my Mac running Sierra 10.12 using PHPMailer. When I go to send the test email utilising Gmail's SMTP server(s), I get a '53' software caused connection abort error as seen below:
2017-04-30 02:59:56 SMTP ERROR: Failed to connect to server: Software caused connection abort (53) 2017-04-30 02:59:56 SMTP connect() failed. https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting Mailer Error: SMTP connect() failed. https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting
I have tried their troubleshooting guide and found nothing else relating to this issue, so I assume it is pretty infrequent.
The code below is based on PHPMailer's Gmail Example which is strange because it is throwing the error. I have obviously hidden my emails and password for StackOverflow:
date_default_timezone_set('Etc/UTC');
require 'PHPMailer/PHPMailerAutoload.php';
$mail = new PHPMailer; // create a new object
$mail->IsSMTP(); // enable SMTP
$mail->SMTPDebug = 1; // debugging: 1 = errors and messages, 2 = messages only
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // authentication enabled
$mail->SMTPSecure = 'ssl'; // secure transfer enabled REQUIRED for Gmail
$mail->Host = "smtp.gmail.com";
$mail->Port = 587; // or 587
$mail->IsHTML(true);
$mail->Username = "email#gmail.com";
$mail->Password = "mypassword";
$mail->SetFrom("email#gmail.com");
$mail->Subject = "Test";
$mail->Body = "hello";
$mail->AddAddress("myotheremail#hotmail.com");
if(!$mail->Send()) {
echo "Mailer Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
echo "Message has been sent";
}
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers

Answer 1

For those who stumble upon this thread:
Thanks to Sahil, the issue was being caused by a setting I was using incorrectly. Instead of $mail->SMTPSecure = 'ssl'; I should've been using $mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls';.
Another issue I discovered was when this was resolved, the mail was taking an extremely long time to send/getting stuck on load which caused a timeout. This was fixed by changing $mail->IsSMTP(); to $mail->IsMail();.
Cheers