There's no easy solution to this. As you say, your settings are correct; as the error message says, the connection times out. That means that sometimes when you send a message, Thunderbird tries to connect with the server and gets a response within the waiting period; at other times it tries to connect and the waiting period elapses before a reply is received. So it's not a problem within Thunderbird itself, it's in the connection between your computer and the server. You'll just have to explore the possibilities. In my case, I used to experience this when one of our kids was still living at home. He would be up in his room playing some endless computer game online, and that 'hogged' our domestic network and slowed all other outgoing connections: when he was out or asleep, everything worked fine. I have seen other solutions posted online which involved re-setting domestic routers or changing the settings. It might also be worth checking your internet connection speed at intervals throughout the day. Ours is better than it used to be, but at one time everything slowed down when our neighbours were online too.

It's true, our connection speed is crap. DSL, usually runs 2.9 Mb. It's pretty consistent as my wife's laptop is the only other device in the house. It's the only game in town, so we are stuck with it.

When I first called Frontier Tech Support, I had two emails I had been unable to send. She wanted to see what happened when I tried to send them. They both immediately whizzed off into space! Every test email after that timed out. I've successfully used Thunderbird email for years. It's only been in the last couple months I've had this problem.

If you are feeling brave you could have a go at increasing the timeout period, so that Thunderbird will wait for longer before giving up. There's an article here which explains the principle: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Modify_Thunderbird_settings You'll see that the example given in the article is about waiting longer to download incoming mail: that's not your problem, so don't just copy that. Instead you need to alter the settings for the outgoing server and you may have to experiment to find the right one. If you want to try it I would strongly advise: a) make a backup copy of your current Thunderbird profile folder and keep it safe, in case you have to revert to it; b) make a note of the current timeout settings before you change them; c) only change one setting at a time and test it before you change anything else; d) remember to save the settings and restart Thunderbird to see what effect it has. Note that this won't make Thunderbird connect to the server any faster, but it may reduce the frequency of the timeout error message appearing.

I'm not sure if I'm that brave or not. The worrisome thing is that it only got to be this way fairly recently. Something changed and it wasn't by me. I would feel better about making changes if I knew what happened.

At any rate, thank you for the advice. If I do find the courage to make changes, I will post the results here.

Please don't insert any leading spaces into your postings here.

it makes them look like this.

dalebert said

I'm not sure if I'm that brave or not. The worrisome thing is that it only got to be this way fairly recently. Something changed and it wasn't by me. I would feel better about making changes if I knew what happened. At any rate, thank you for the advice. If I do find the courage to make changes, I will post the results here.

dalebert said

It's true, our connection speed is crap. DSL, usually runs 2.9 Mb. It's pretty consistent as my wife's laptop is the only other device in the house. It's the only game in town, so we are stuck with it. When I first called Frontier Tech Support, I had two emails I had been unable to send. She wanted to see what happened when I tried to send them. They both immediately whizzed off into space! Every test email after that timed out. I've successfully used Thunderbird email for years. It's only been in the last couple months I've had this problem.