I need to make a program sending emails using the Gmail smtp server. Everything works fine except for one thing. In order to make it work, I had to go on my google account and create an app password otherwise it wouldn't send and told me I had to do that. So my question is, does Gmail absolutely require you to have an app password in order to send emails from an application?
You need to authenticate with the Gmail SMTP server in order to send mail.
This means either using your Google account password (or better - a Google account password for a new account with no sensitive information in it), or an app password if you have 2FA enabled on your Google account.