The spinning Arrow in WP Contact Form 7

So I was using the Hickory for a project along with Contact Form 7 Plugin and Easy WP SMTP. I used this setup for contact form and a couple of forms in the blog.

Now comes the interesting part !! When I submitted the form, the arrows in the bottom would keep on spinning !! The mail was sent in backend but the user saw the infinitely spinning arrows. If you go to the support forum, you will see maaaannnnyyyy posts about the same. Everyone has their hacky solutions !! Finally a gentleman pointed out where to look the error !! I looked into the ajax call the form was making and realised that the response was NOT a JSON. But an amalgation of errors and a JSON.

I was getting :

SMTP -> FROM SERVER:220 mx.google.com ESMTP ko10sm16651579pbd.52 - gsmtp

<br />SMTP -> FROM SERVER: 250-mx.google.com at your service, [128.199.209.28]
250-SIZE 35882577
250-8BITMIME
250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN XOAUTH XOAUTH2 PLAIN-CLIENTTOKEN
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250 CHUNKING

<br />SMTP -> FROM SERVER:250 2.1.0 OK ko10sm16651579pbd.52 - gsmtp

<br />SMTP -> FROM SERVER:250 2.1.5 OK ko10sm16651579pbd.52 - gsmtp

<br />SMTP -> FROM SERVER:354  Go ahead ko10sm16651579pbd.52 - gsmtp

<br />SMTP -> FROM SERVER:250 2.0.0 OK 1401650231 ko10sm16651579pbd.52 - gsmtp

<br />SMTP -> FROM SERVER:221 2.0.0 closing connection ko10sm16651579pbd.52 - gsmtp

<br />{"mailSent":true,"into":"#wpcf7-blah-blah","captcha":{"captcha-blah blah":"http:\/\/blahblah.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/wpcf7_captcha\/blah blah.png"},"message":"Your message was sent successfully. Thanks."}

And What I needed was just

{"mailSent":true,"into":"#wpcf7-blah-blah","captcha":{"captcha-blah blah":"http:\/\/blahblah.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/wpcf7_captcha\/blah blah.png"},"message":"Your message was sent successfully. Thanks."}

Then somebody pointed out that Easy WP SMTP has an Enable SMTP Debug option !! Voila !! So this was causing the errors getting printed in response to the ajax call and rendering the response unreadable to Contact Form !!

I spent quiet some time debuging this !! Hope this saves someone some time in the future !!

Peace !!