Unable to send email using sendgrid

Pretty new to Nextcloud but reasonably okay with Linux. I’ve provisioned a Nextcloud Centos 7.9 based virtual machine on Azure using a very handy predefined template for Nextcloud. It’s up and running but trying to get email working. When I program it for sendgrid, I get the following error:

I’ve installed telnet to make sure I can connect to sendgrid and I think that’s okay:

Any assistance appreciated.

Permission denied

You run your telnet test as user “root”, but the web server is running as web server user, e.g. “www-data” or “wwwrun”. I would recommend to repeat the test with the web server user.

Additionally you might enter “EHLO Test” right after you opened the telnet session to see the options the server is presenting.
BTW, please also have a look on the administrator guide, parameter
'mail_smtpmode' => 'smtp', to enable the debug mode.

Perhaps you must set “STARTTLS” instead of “TLS/SSL” Link

Since posting, I’ve taught myself the manual installation method on a plain Azure Centos server and it’s worked on there. Yes, must use STARTTLS: