Unable to load Admin pages

I have not logged in to Admin in several months. Friday, I decided to add a few products. My login in and password have been saved on the computer for several years. When I hit the Submit button it does nothing for about a minute then I get an error:

"Not Found

The requested URL was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."

So, I looked into the log folder and found lots (100s) of errors all saying about the same thing:

"yDEBUG-adm-20261004-033312-268043.log ( ASCII text )

[04-Oct-2026 03:38:12 America/Boise] PHP Notice: Email Error: SMTP connect() failed. https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting

in /home4/schemat2/public_html/Test/includes/functions/functions_email.php on line 511"

Line 511 in that file is shown here with *** before and after:

// If a mail-related error (reported by PHPMailer) occurred, treat the 'recipients_failed' message as a special

        // case, logging to a differently-named log file to make finding these issues easier.  Otherwise, log a PHP notice.

        //

        if ($ErrorInfo !== '') {

            $mail_langs = $mail->getTranslations();

            if (strpos($ErrorInfo, $mail_langs['recipients_failed']) === false) {

               // Don't log SMTP rejected spam; log others

               if (!str_contains($ErrorInfo, 'spam content')) {

               \*\*\*\*\*\*    **trigger_error('Email Error: ' . $ErrorInfo);** \*\*\*\*\*\*

               }

            } else {

                $log_prefix = (IS_ADMIN_FLAG === true) ? '/myDEBUG-bounced-email-adm-' : '/myDEBUG-bounced-email-';

                $log_date = new DateTime();

                error_log('Request URI: ' . $\_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] . PHP_EOL . PHP_EOL . $ErrorInfo, 3, DIR_FS_LOGS . $log_prefix . $log_date->format('Ymd-His-u') . '.log');

            }

I checked my emails and found them all to be working. Then it occurred to me that I have been getting notices from Paypal that I got a payment from a customer. Checked my Paypal balance - there was the payment. BUT no emails from Zen Cart telling me what was purchased. I used a login I created when I first started using ZC and signed in. Found a digital download for a few bucks and purchased it. Got the email from Paypal that I got money. Got another one from the Paypal acoount I used to make the purchase that I had sent the money. And sure enough I got the download link for the file I purchased.

I then remembered several months ago I had deleted some old email accounts that I wasn't using any more. I MAY have accidentally deleted the Admin email account. Would that be what is causing this?

Over the weekend I used FTP to reload all the files from a backup I had done earlier this year. Nothing changed. I can't get into the admin but I do have access to all the files. I expect there is some configuration file where the admin email account and password are defined. Somebody reading this does know where I can find it. It's a start.

Thanks in advance,

Lee

If you can't login to your admin, follow these directions:

https://docs.zen-cart.com/user/troubleshooting/reset_admin_password/