The ongoing unreliability of Postfix suggests we may wish to switch to Exim, to give us better local support [see MB261524].
https://www.4armed.com/blog/install-and-configure-exim-4-smtp-relay-via-smarthost-on-ubuntu/
is a useful guide. The smarthost URL will need to be a configuration option obviously.
Otherwise, we need to work out why Postfix is occasionally losing its host lookup.