TorBirdy is an extension which configures Thunderbird to make connections over the Tor anonymity network. This includes: sending and receiving email, retrieving RSS feeds. It anonymizes your location when sending an email.

If used in conjunction with Enigmail, TorBirdy will also fetch / send OpenPGP keys over the Tor Network.

Troubleshooting

Once you've installed TorBirdy, it expects that you run tor on port 9050.

If you do not run system tor but you do run TorBrowser, you'll want TorBirdy to use TorBrowser's tor port instead and tell TorBirdy to use port 9150. On the bottom right corner in Thunderbird click the green "TorBirdy: active" text and select "User defined proxy server".

Use 127.0.0.1 as Host and port 9150.

This should work :)

Memory Hole

!This is only relevant if you also use the Enigmail addon.

Since version 0.2.3 TorBirdy enables Memory Hole. This is cool, because it allows to encrypt email subjects! All emails will appear as having the subject "Encrypted email" - until you decrypt the email. Then, the encrypted email headers will be read.

However, Memory Hole currently breaks email threading in most email clients (Thunderbird at least).

Furthermore, Memory Hole does not work when using Schleuder encrypted email lists. Thus, you might want to disable this feature in Thunderbird.

Disabling Memory Hole when using TorBirdy from Sid

Thus, here are some instructions to disable this feature when using TorBirdy from Sid.

The preferences are accessible in Thunderbird under Preferences → Preferences → Advanced → Config Editor (button on the bottom). From there you can change the preferences values, which will then be written in prefs.js under the format user_pref("preference_name",value);

You will need to set the preference:

extensions.torbirdy.custom.extensions.enigmail.protectHeaders = false and set it to False

(Right click -> Add -> Boolean)