This call is made to only retrieve important WP Mail SMTP plugin related notifications from its parent company, WPForms.
To completely deactivate that you can use this hook:
remove_action( 'plugins_loaded', 'wp_mail_smtp_am_notifications' );
But I strongly advise to leave it as is: you will get important notifications about upcoming changes. Also, this request is made only once in a week, so no real impact on performance.
I actually tried this, putting it in the theme’s functions.php, but it didn’t work. I suspect because ‘plugins_loaded’ was already parsed by wordpress – so I probably need to put this inside a function that is called on ‘init’.
I don’t mind leaving this, but as I said – you need to look into why it constantly returns a 403 forbidden message…
