A rollback was done to eliminate version change as the cause of the problem. 1.6.14 worked, than it was updated to 1.6.17 and it did not work. Rolling back to 1.6.14 was expected to confim if the new version of Postfix was the cause. It is currently back on 1.6.17
OpenSSL is not modified. It was reinstalled several times. The certificate for the server is correctly installed and is correctly listed in php.ini under curl.cainfo