Tor and Thunderbird: Outgoing Email Unsafe?

[Mike Perry]

Thus spake Paul Syverson (syverson at itd.nrl.navy.mil):

> On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 08:54:42AM -0500, Michael Holstein wrote:
> > Most exit nodes disallow port 25 (smtp) because NOT doing so would make 
> > TOR a spammer's paradise. If you know a relay-server that runs smtps or 
> > uses an alternate smtp port, use that.
> > 
> 
> Actually we would expect Tor to be a relatively inefficient vehicle
> for spam even with port 25 open, so hardly a paradise. The decision to
> block port 25 by default was based partly on the expectation that spam
> is the most known and widely despised source of abuse and we expected
> people to raise this as a concern.  We wanted to be able to say that
> Tor was simply not a vehicle for spam since it is default configured
> so as not to be able to transmit email at all. (I know that's too
> quick, but we're reasoning at the level of soundbites.) Even with
> that, it has not prevented ignorant statements in various places from
> making the association that Tor is a spam engine. Imagine how much
> worse the image problem would be if there were even a grain of truth
> in these statements.  We were also partly concerned about network
> load.

Hmm, maybe a middle ground might be to make note of which SMTP servers
are authenticated and operate on an SSL port, and provide such a list
on the wiki so that node operators can consider writing specific exit
policy lines for just those SMTP servers' IPs. 

-- 
Mike Perry
Mad Computer Scientist
fscked.org evil labs