I've read some of zbadger's past questions - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/user/zbadger/questions - plus the initial posting in this question, which states sending fails for both phone and desktop (which are two totally different code bases). So it's hard to escape the possible conclusion that spectrum is being unreliable at sending email.

Further, google AI states "Using Charter/Spectrum email with Thunderbird is generally unreliable for sending mail, especially for legacy accounts (rr.com and twc.com). While receiving (POP/IMAP) often works, users frequently experience intermittent SMTP (outgoing) server errors, particularly after password changes.

More (not great examples I'm afraid) :

• https://support.mozilla.org/gl/questions/1436812
• https://support.mozilla.org/mk/questions/1415317

... So it's hard to escape the possible conclusion that spectrum is being unreliable at sending email. Further, google AI states "Using Charter/Spectrum email with Thunderbird is generally unreliable for sending mail, especially for legacy accounts (rr.com and twc.com). While receiving (POP/IMAP) often works, users frequently experience intermittent SMTP (outgoing) server errors, particularly after password changes.

That would track with my experience in the brief time I've been using Thunderbird.

I have not done any password change but I still get Thunderbird occasionally asking me to reenter the password.

Trying to send email through Spectrum with Thunderbird occasionally works -- other times Thunderbird sits at the sending screen forever before it will eventually time out (well over 5 minutes, I usually give up and click cancel after about 5 minutes, I've only seen TB actually get to time out twice and both those were times I just left it running while I did something else (such as typing here or fixing lunch) then came back to find that it had eventually timed out. While testing I found that on several occasions the email had actually been sent (and received) while TB was still showing that it was unsuccessfully trying to send.

I can't place the blame on either Spectrum or Thunderbird specifically because I don't totally trust anything that Spectrum does with the email system that they inherited from Road Runner and then fired everyone who actually knew how to maintain it, but I do know that Microsoft Live Mail (over a decade old) works when used on Spectrum so it seems that it is just the combination of Spectrum and Thunderbird that don't fit well together.

From everything I have been told, Spectrum intends to get completely out of the email business some time in the future (their tech support guy said he thought it would be within a year). I'm going to be switching to using my gmail accounts as my primary email addresses. But, of course, it takes time for everyone to really make the change so I'm sure I will need to at least keep incoming Spectrum emails probably as long as they keep their mail server running.

I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what the timeout discussion has to do with the original question about the inability to send emails out.

What happens when you TRY to send emails through Spectrum? [Your question said that sending doesn't work, but neither the question nor any of the explanations have said exactly what does happen]

My "sending does not work" first started as Thunderbird not finding the Spectrum SMTP server because Thunderbird automatically configured the wrong settings.

I changed the settings to the ones Spectrum says to use and Thunderbird would connect to the server but would fail authentication.

I changed the settings to those suggested here: a unique description for each outgoing server server name mail.twc.com port 587 connection security STARTTLS authentication Normal Password User Name full email address

Sometimes Thunderbird would send the email successfully. Sometimes Thunderbird would display the popup showing that it was sending and would just stay that way until either it timed out or I would give up and cancel it.

I eventually found that even when Thunderbird failed to complete the SMTP exchange, the email usually was actually sent -- apparently there was some problem between Spectrum and Thunderbird where Thunderbird was not receiving or not recognizing the acknowledgement from the Spectrum SMTP server.

According to some research by Wayne Mery, there are frequent problems using Thunderbird with Spectrum, especially on the legacy domains. (That information is elsewhere in this thread). My brief experience would tend to support the observation that Thunderbird and Spectrum's legacy SMTP server don't talk to each other very well even when the settings are all correct.

I don't think this is entirely a Spectrum problem and I don't think it is entirely a Thunderbird problem - but the two just don't work together very well.

No, none of my messages that I try to send through Thunderbird are going out anymore. I’ve had Spectrum for decades and it’s predecessor of course Time Warner. It’s only within the last few months that it stopped sending my emails. I don’t get a message at all. All it does is put my attempted email that I tried to send into my outbox.

This may or may not help, but here goes:

I had the same problem for my roadrunner.com email and it was resolved by 0) setting up an IMAP account in TB; 1) changing my Spectrum password (through the "forgot my password link". For some reason, the Spectrum 2nd level support guy said changing it in the account might require several changes to take effect); and then using my new Spectrum password as my email password along with the following account settings:

incoming server: mail.twc.com, 995 (POP) or 993 (IMAP), SSL/TLS, normal password, email address

outgoing server: mail.twc.com, 587, STARTTLS, normal password, email address

And then dancing around the room widdershins ;-)

Voodoo anyone?

zbadger, are you any closer to solving this?

no, I never received a solution from this forum, although appreciate people trying at times. What I did find out is that after returning from out of state where I could not send out email once I got back to my home state I was able to send out emails from my phone. Why should that make any difference?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/user/tajomiai/questions I have same problem with my gmail account. I read through the article, and it seems that unfortunately there is no solution provided yet.

I've been wrestling with this for a couple of weeks now after things worked normally for ages. I haven't made any changes to my Thunderbird client (updated to 116, but same issues), but Win11 has updated a couple of times. I spent an hour online with Spectrum support tonight and we determined that: 1) webmail interface works fine, 2) Apple Mail connection on iPhone works fine, 3) The settings for Thunderbird are correct, 4) Thunderbird connection on PC is totally crippled for both receiving and sending. It will occasionally download messages in a big batch, but rarely in real time. My time-out errors are for mail.twc.com on IMAP, but SMTP throws its own unique errors about the server being unavailable or refusing connections - then it also says that it can't save a copy of the email. Of minor interest is that a tracert happily traverses 11 hops of charter servers, then hits the spectrum ones and dies after hop 13.

12    48 ms    47 ms    46 ms  syn-150-181-106-039.inf.spectrum.com [150.181.106.39]
13    48 ms    48 ms    48 ms  syn-024-169-190-243.inf.spectrum.com [24.169.190.243]

I want to thank folks for confirming my suspicions that Charter is likely to sunset their consumer email services entirely at some point as it's a cost rather than revenue center. I just need to grind through swinging a hundred other accounts that use this email to another provider. It will totally suck, but at least I'll be easily able to switch ISPs in the future.

=================

I did a bit more digging and noticed that Spectrum specified SSL for IMAP inbound, but waffles between SSL and STARTTLS for outbound (either way port 587 seems to have replaced 465). I turned on verbose logging and took a look at the SMTP timeout and connection refused errors. Drilling down, I see the code below. It looks like Thunderbird is hard-wired to fire STARTTLS no matter what the client config says. Is it possible that TWC has started ignoring STARTTLS handshakes? I can't get SMTP to work with either STARTTLS or SSL/TLS on port 587, but thought I'd ask.

constructor(server) {

   this.options = {
     alwaysSTARTTLS:
       server.socketType == Ci.nsMsgSocketType.trySTARTTLS ||
       server.socketType == Ci.nsMsgSocketType.alwaysSTARTTLS,
     requireTLS: server.socketType == Ci.nsMsgSocketType.SSL,
   };

connect() {

   if (this.socket?.readyState == "open") {
     this.logger.debug("Reusing a connection");
     this.onidle();
   } else {
     let hostname = this._server.hostname.toLowerCase();
     let port = this._server.port || (this.options.requireTLS ? 465 : 587);
     this.logger.debug(`Connecting to smtp://${hostname}:${port}`);
     this._secureTransport = this.options.requireTLS;
     this.socket = new TCPSocket(hostname, port, {
       binaryType: "arraybuffer",
       useSecureTransport: this._secureTransport,
     });

I've somehow convinced my system to work again, but these settings are only valid for "san.rr.com." Note that I am running Thunderbird v.115.18.0 -- AND that I've saved the Spectrum email password(s) locally within Thunderbird's password manager. The only other odd thing is that I had an old SMTP server entry cached in the settings, but mail.twc.com was marked as the default. As soon as I deleted that obsolete entry and verified that passwords were cached for both IMAP and SMTP, everything worked normally again, but...

IMAP 993 mail.twc.com SSL/TLS Normal Password

SMTP 587 mail.twc.com STARTTLS Normal Password

I tested these three times by sending an email to myself and it worked. I checked the IMAP function by watching in the webmail window as well as the Thunderbird app while sending saved drafts and deleting received messages to verify folder clean up. Everything looked good - and then it hung again on a send message. However, to my surprise the messages did eventually land in the inbox. Then on a message deletion and clean-up, Thunderbird threw this message.

"The current operation on 'Inbox' did not succeed. The mail server for account clane@san.rr.com responded: Serious error while processing UID FETCH (CassdbDatabaseError (134/6))."

This is an IMAP-specific error from the Spectrum side. I looked it up and tried the trick for deleting inbox.msf and rebuilding it. However, Spectrum started timing out on the basic mailbox connection at launch again. After several more attempts, Thunderbird connected and resynced the Inbox. During that time, it threw the error window that the connection timed out, but in the status bar of the main window I could see it continuing to process messages. My current theory is that the Spectrum email server (in this case "san.rr.com") has inadequate resources (either network sockets or process memory) and intermittently just gags on connection requests. Thunderbird proactively raises the error dialog, but continues trying to connect in the background - and sometimes even succeeds. It's insanely frustrating because it's intermittent and there's nothing that we as users or Mozilla as the client platform can do to mitigate the issue.