[tor-talk] TorBirdy seems to connect to the same exit node again and again

[l.m]

Hi again,

To demonstrate further the importance of port choice I think a
clarification is in order. From tor's spec [0] an exit may specify an
accept or reject policy. So the number of exits that may allow your
exiting traffic (in this case mail) is those that "accept" and those
that don't "reject". Keep that in mind when parsing your data in
whichever method. The count is roughly 12 exits for port 25 versus 657
for port 587. The choice of exit is influenced by exit bandwidth and
successful use (in the short-term).

You mentioned trying to perform a similar look-up for exit policies
using Atlas. I didn't see an easy way to do so from the protocol [1]
used by Atlas. It's possible to perform the same inspection of exit
policy (as parsing/cat+grep local data) using the wget command with a
parametrization of the details method. There's no built in way to just
get the count of exits allowing some exit traffic. Or is there? Maybe
this would be a useful feature? It would allow a more informed choice
(12 versus 657 out of ~1000).

--leeroy

[0] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/dir-spec.txt#n2273
[1] https://onionoo.torproject.org/protocol.html