The idea would be to make this a class attribute so that it can be overridden by overriding `EmailBackend`, for example

    class MyEmailBackend(EmailBackend):
        timeout = 120

`settings.EMAIL_BACKEND = 'path.to.MyEmailBackend'`

You can add documentation in this section https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/email/#smtp-backend
A mention in the release notes is also needed.