Hi, for some years I have been running a browser (Firefox) through a SSH tunnel (Putty on Windows). I recently had reason to believe that my incoming email might be being blocked because of spam blacklisting of the block of IPs my ISP was using (dynamic IP addr). I therefore set up Thunderbird to use a proxy in the same way as FireFox: Putty SSH connection with a Dynamic tunnel on port 'nmnm' - and Firefox/Thunderbird set to use a 127.0.0.1:nmnm SOCKSv5 proxy (no other proxy settings, and no change to email accounts)
This seemed to work OK (well it certainly works for the browser - confirmed by whatismyip and icanhazip.com) - then I Googled for 'Thunderbird proxy' and most of the posts suggested changing email account servers to 127.0.0.1:993 [imap] + 127.0.0.1:465 [smtp] with ports 993/465 individually forwarded in Putty. I think my method is much neater - if it works - So: # how can I check if my method works for email? # how would you do it?