Hi Leeroy, Yes, Atlas was a poor choice. Before you suggested searching the log through Terminal, I wasn't even thinking of that possibility.
As for improvements: I think a) would be quite important. Using a better port worked, as far as I can tell, and I was not aware that I put myself in a very bad position when choosing port 25. But then my life is not depending on TorBirdy, while other peoples' lives do, so maybe a hint in the "Before using TorBirdy" advice or a warning message from within TorBirdy could help those who are not tech-savvy. Options b) and c) would be very luxurious, but option a) really solved my problem, and seems quite important for those who come from a different background. Other things that come to mind: "Test proxy settings" could be somewhere more prominent, for users like me :) I am the kind of person that does not disable the warning message that pops up when clicking on the TorBirdy preferences. I am -manually- logging what exit ports TorBirdy uses, out of curiosity. I will keep you posted in case something weird happens again. Thanks for the help! Sophie l.m: > Hi Sophie, > > Hmm...Perhaps Atlas isn't the best choice here. At any given time the > exits you can choose from are those you know of locally. It might be > better to focus on TorBirdy instead. > > When using Tor Browser, the tor process is kind enough to take notice > when using certain ports (WarnPlaintextPorts). So maybe TorBirdy > should do the same. That is to say, make TorBirdy more verbose about > choices for mail server port. Had you been warned that port 25 is not > the port you're looking for you might have chosen differently. Even if > the port was chosen temporarily, a reminder could've helped. To make > things worse you have to switch between TorBirdy and Tor Browser to > change identities. Then you have to run something like > check.torproject.org to ensure your ip is different from a > (potentially blocked) previous ip. > > So things TorBirdy could do better to avoid this problem in the future > include: > a) Be more verbose about choosing the mail server port. Possibly > include a reminder which can be disabled. Warn when making a hazardous > choice such as 25. A known abuse port and one which is blocked in the > default exit policy and reduced exit policy. > b) Provide new identity functionality in TorBirdy. It would need to be > careful not to "step on the toes" of Tor Browser. To this end it could > emulate the NEWNYM signal by leveraging stream isolation. New > identities triggered by TorBirdy would create streams isolated from > previous streams. By tracking streams associated with mail servers > TorBirdy can ensure old connections are closed before new ones. It can > do this in a way such that no interference occurs with Tor Browser. > c) Enable TorBirdy to configure use of TrackHostExits/Expire. Purely a > preference to deal with Tor Browser triggering a new identity when you > might prefer to have TorBirdy continue to use the last exit for a > time. If you've triggered a new identity in TorBirdy to avoid a > blocked exit this could also mitigate the problem of a blocked exit > being reused. Is there a better way to achieve the same result here? > > Comments, suggestions, criticisms? > > --leeroy > -- tor-talk mailing list - [email protected] To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
