Do you have an antivirus program scanning emails? I would guess that to be the problem because they are horribly slow doing their useless task on outgoing mail.

Do you have an antivirus program scanning emails? I would guess that to be the problem because they are horribly slow doing their useless task on outgoing mail.

Thanks for the suggestion. As I have done before, I turned off the AV email scanner, and tried to send a test email to myself. But the error message still says Tbird can't connect to the outgoing server. Earthlink says there is no problem on their end. So that leaves Tbird as the possible culprit for failure to send. It receives emails with no problem.

I've been using MS Mail for the last year to send emails. MS Mail seems to use the same outgoing server and settings with no problem. But I'd prefer to use Tbird.

I'm still hoping for a suggestion to fix the outgoing mail glitch in Tbird. I'm using MS Mail to send out email. Mail doesn't show sever settings, but it has to connect to Earthlink server to pickup my mail. It may use its own servers to send outgoing mail. Does Tbird have an option to use a different server? I tried "mail.smtp2go.com", but didn't work. Original post :

Thunderbird cannot send emails. Outgoing server smtpauth.earthlink.net

Error : outgoing server timed out. Changing server settings doesn't fix problem

Set mail.smtp2go.com as default server, butTbird still uses smtpauth.earthlink.net

Forced to use MS Mail for sending emails.

Earthlink support has tried various server settings, but nothing worked. So the problem seems to be in Tbird.