I was going to ask if any relay ops opened up ports 25 & 110 to allow email through their circuits, but I guess that would be a moot question, as all Tor traffic goes through Tor browsers. Even if a user is checking his email from like Gmail.com, he is still going through port 443, right (web interface).
Which leads me to the more important question: Why do we not have a version of Tor for email??? Would that not be uber cool and useful?
You may check out my tutorial, regarding running you own and free email infrastructure for family and friends, via Tor Hidden Services.
I run Thunderbird with IMAPS connecting to TCP-993 and SMTPS connecting to TCP-465 proxied to a Tor client which then routes across Tor to my email service provider. This has worked flawlessly for years.
@Torceror would that be any different from using Tor as socks proxy in Thunderbird’s Connection settings - like so?
@Noino, yes, that is correct for “SOCKS Host” / “SOCKS v5”.
Additionally, for Tor stream isolation, please consider adding a second entry for “SocksPort” dedicated for Thunderbird in “/etc/tor/torrc”, for example:
## SocksPort 127.0.0.1:9050 is for general usage.
SocksPort 127.0.0.1:9050
## SocksPort 127.0.0.1:9055 is for Thunderbird.
SocksPort 127.0.0.1:9055