Connection timeouts during initial configuration steps

[aheath70]

Successfully installed the component through HACS, restarted Home Assistant.

Adding Geely connected device, I put in email address, select zone as Australia, and take all other defaults. When I click on submit, it eventually times out and I never receive the email.

Logs below

2026-08-04 13:56:02.894 DEBUG (SyncWorker_1) [custom_components.geely_connect.api] captcha attempt 1 threw: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='captcha4.geely.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /load?captcha_id=4c1ef89633cbab987d1ee170115a8dd4&challenge=d7d75290-cf23-46bc-9c7b-43d19bfec4c8&client_type=web&language=eng&encryption=AES_RSA&ext=%7B%22ua%22%3A%22Mozilla%2F5.0+%28iPhone%3B+CPU+iPhone+OS+18_7+like+Mac+OS+X%29+AppleWebKit%2F605.1.15+%28KHTML%2C+like+Gecko%29+Mobile%2F15E148%22%7D&callback=geetest_1785815717358 (Caused by ConnectTimeoutError(<HTTPSConnection(host='captcha4.geely.com', port=443) at 0x7f70bd925e50>, 'Connection to captcha4.geely.com timed out. (connect timeout=15)'))
2026-08-04 13:56:48.258 DEBUG (SyncWorker_1) [custom_components.geely_connect.api] captcha attempt 2 threw: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='captcha4.geely.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /load?captcha_id=4c1ef89633cbab987d1ee170115a8dd4&challenge=722c5ea2-af2a-4215-8d8a-9705119aa2bb&client_type=web&language=eng&encryption=AES_RSA&ext=%7B%22ua%22%3A%22Mozilla%2F5.0+%28iPhone%3B+CPU+iPhone+OS+18_7+like+Mac+OS+X%29+AppleWebKit%2F605.1.15+%28KHTML%2C+like+Gecko%29+Mobile%2F15E148%22%7D&callback=geetest_1785815762913 (Caused by ConnectTimeoutError(<HTTPSConnection(host='captcha4.geely.com', port=443) at 0x7f70b323ac10>, 'Connection to captcha4.geely.com timed out. (connect timeout=15)'))
2026-08-04 13:57:33.825 DEBUG (SyncWorker_1) [custom_components.geely_connect.api] captcha attempt 3 threw: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='captcha4.geely.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /load?captcha_id=4c1ef89633cbab987d1ee170115a8dd4&challenge=9bf691b4-ac40-44fc-ae11-bfe8680fea34&client_type=web&language=eng&encryption=AES_RSA&ext=%7B%22ua%22%3A%22Mozilla%2F5.0+%28iPhone%3B+CPU+iPhone+OS+18_7+like+Mac+OS+X%29+AppleWebKit%2F605.1.15+%28KHTML%2C+like+Gecko%29+Mobile%2F15E148%22%7D&callback=geetest_1785815808277 (Caused by ConnectTimeoutError(<HTTPSConnection(host='captcha4.geely.com', port=443) at 0x7f70c5cda5d0>, 'Connection to captcha4.geely.com timed out. (connect timeout=15)'))
2026-08-04 13:58:19.206 DEBUG (SyncWorker_1) [custom_components.geely_connect.api] captcha attempt 4 threw: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='captcha4.geely.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /load?captcha_id=4c1ef89633cbab987d1ee170115a8dd4&challenge=9a080f42-56d0-4289-a6f8-9758f609e321&client_type=web&language=eng&encryption=AES_RSA&ext=%7B%22ua%22%3A%22Mozilla%2F5.0+%28iPhone%3B+CPU+iPhone+OS+18_7+like+Mac+OS+X%29+AppleWebKit%2F605.1.15+%28KHTML%2C+like+Gecko%29+Mobile%2F15E148%22%7D&callback=geetest_1785815853845 (Caused by ConnectTimeoutError(<HTTPSConnection(host='captcha4.geely.com', port=443) at 0x7f70c5cd87d0>, 'Connection to captcha4.geely.com timed out. (connect timeout=15)'))

[YossiKon]

Hi @aheath70, thanks for the clear report — the DEBUG log you pasted made this diagnosable down to the exact line, and it also exposed a real UX bug on our side. Here's the full picture.

What's happening

Setup dies at the very first step. Before the login email can be requested, the integration must solve Geely's slide-captcha, and both captcha calls go to captcha4.geely.com — a Geely-operated host in mainland China (Alibaba Cloud, Shanghai, behind *.geely-auto-gtm.com). The email itself is only requested from access-app-global.geely.com after the captcha is solved — which is why you never receive it: the flow never gets that far.

Your log shows a TCP connect timeout to that host: your Home Assistant machine asked for a connection and got silence. Because the hostname resolves to 3 addresses and each gets the full 15-second connect timeout, each attempt burns ~45 s — exactly the spacing in your log — and the integration (unhelpfully — see below) retried 5 times, so you sat through nearly 4 minutes of spinner before a generic error.

Two important details:

• The whole flow runs from the Home Assistant machine, not from your browser. VPN/DNS settings on the laptop or phone you're using don't matter — only the network the HA box itself is on.
• A connect timeout (rather than "failed to resolve") usually means one of: a DNS filter (Pi-hole / AdGuard / router "China blocklist") returning a sinkhole address that silently drops packets, a router/firewall geo-blocking Chinese IP ranges, or plain bad routing from your ISP to cn-shanghai.

How to confirm, from the HA box

SSH into the HA host (or the SSH add-on) and run:

curl -sv --connect-timeout 10 https://captcha4.geely.com/ -o /dev/null

Success looks like TLS handshake lines; your failure mode will show which IP was attempted and time out. If curl isn't available:

python3 -c "import socket;s=socket.create_connection(('captcha4.geely.com',443),10);print('TCP OK ->',s.getpeername());s.close()"

And cross-check DNS:

nslookup captcha4.geely.com
nslookup captcha4.geely.com 1.1.1.1

The genuine answer chains through geely-auto-gtm.com to *.cn-shanghai.alb.aliyuncsslb.com with addresses like 47.117.x.x / 8.153.x.x. If your local resolver returns 0.0.0.0 or a private IP instead, that's a DNS filter — allowlist captcha4.geely.com, *.geely-auto-gtm.com and *.aliyuncsslb.com and retry.

For reference, the full set of hosts setup needs to reach from the HA machine: captcha4.geely.com, access-app-global.geely.com, m-lcmsam-eu.geely.com, and for an Australian-market car afterwards api.ecloudkr.com / m-lcmsam-kr.geely.com / apis.ecloudkr.com.

Some reassurance: the Australia/APAC path itself is fine — it was verified end-to-end with an Australian-market EX5. Once captcha4.geely.com is reachable from your HA box, the rest of the flow should just work.

What we fixed because of this report

Your report showed the integration handling this badly, so the following now ships (commit b73c7b6):

1. Fail fast on network failure — a connection-level error to the captcha host now aborts immediately instead of retrying 5 times (retries only make sense for captcha-solve misses, not an unreachable host). ~45 s instead of ~4 minutes.
2. An honest error message — instead of the generic "Failed to send the email code. Try again in a minute." you now get a message naming the unreachable host and pointing at DNS filtering / geo-blocking on the HA machine's network.
3. A README troubleshooting section listing the hosts setup must reach and the test commands above.

Please run the curl/nslookup checks and tell us what you see — and once you've allowlisted/unblocked the host, I'd love to hear that setup completed so we can close this.