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What @TransactionalEventListener actually fires on commit, on rollback, and on neither -- plus a write inside AFTER_COMMIT that survives or vanishes depending on your connection pool. Measured in a playground, not quoted from the Javadoc.
Spring's plain @EventListener runs on your thread, inside your transaction, before your next line — and a chained event is fully handled before the original finishes. Everything here was verified by running it, not by reading the reference page.
A fire-and-forget @Async listener turns every SMTP hiccup into a lost message. Here is how @TransactionalEventListener plus an event publication table makes it durable — and the four ways that setup silently does nothing.