Greetings. For many years I have used Thunderbird to send and receive mail through my Outlook account (while happily donating to Mozilla). A few months ago, every initial attempt to send a message abruptly started to fail, generating the dreaded notice that “the message could not be sent because the connection to Outgoing server (SMTP) smtp-mail.outlook.com timed out.” What is odd is that if I keep trying to send, the message always goes out eventually -- sometimes after only two tries, sometimes after ten tries. Thus, my Outlook account works, my Thunderbird settings work, the SMTP server works -- but only at random intervals. The problem has continued through several Thunderbird updates, including the current one (147.0.1). I tried changing the server to smtp.office365.com and got the same performance. I am on MacOS 15.4 and am not running any third-party antivirus or firewall product. My thanks to anyone who has insight into this problem.