Thunderbird is a popular free email client developed by Mozilla. Similar to Firefox, Thunderbird offers a large choice of add-ons for extra features and customization. This article focuses on four add-ons to improve your privacy.
Enigmail
网络监控无所不在！这里提供相关的知识、资讯、加密和隐私强化工具来保护一般使用者，对抗大规模的全球监控！You are being watched! Knowledge, encryption and privacy tools to protect you against global mass surveillance.
Encrypting emails using GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) is the best way to keep their contents private. If you aren’t familiar with GPG, check out our primer right here on the Magazine.
Enigmail is the go-to add-on for using OpenPGP with Thunderbird. Indeed, Enigmail integrates well with Thunderbird, and lets you encrypt, decrypt, and digitally sign and verify emails.
TorBirdy is in beta and should be considered experimental. Please make sure that before using it, you are aware of the known issues and leaks by reading the “Before using TorBirdy” and “Known TorBirdy” Issues sections on the project website. Torbutton for Thunderbird and related.bird forks. Contribute to ioerror/torbirdy development by creating an account on GitHub. Because of technical reasons (restricted by Thunderbird), it is not possible to apply the TorBirdy settings to specific email accounts. Have a look at the Transparent Torification option, which allows you to keep all TorBirdy privacy settings intact except telling TorBirdy to use Tor (the proxy settings are cleared). This allows you to access a particular account without Tor since the proxy.
Paranoia
Paranoia gives you access to critical information about your incoming emails. An emoticon shows the encryption state between servers an email traveled through before reaching your inbox.
A yellow, happy emoticon tells you all connections were encrypted. A blue, sad emoticon means one connection was not encrypted. Finally, a red, scared emoticon shows on more than one connection the message wasn’t encrypted.
More details about these connections are available, so you can check which servers were used to deliver the email.
Sensitivity Header
Sensitivity Header is a simple add-on that lets you select the privacy level of an outgoing email. Using the option menu, you can select a sensitivity: Normal, Personal, Private and Confidential.
Adding this header doesn’t add extra security to email. However, some email clients or mail transport/user agents (MTA/MUA) can use this header to process the message differently based on the sensitivity.
Note that this add-on is marked as experimental by its developers.
Torbirdy Thunderbird 68
TorBirdy
If you’re really concerned about your privacy, TorBirdy is the add-on for you. It configures Thunderbird to use the Tor network.
TorBirdy offers less privacy on email accounts that have been used without Tor before, as noted in the documentation.
Please bear in mind that email accounts that have been used without Tor before offer less privacy/anonymity/weaker pseudonyms than email accounts that have always been accessed with Tor. But nevertheless, TorBirdy is still useful for existing accounts or real-name email addresses. For example, if you are looking for location anonymity — you travel a lot and don’t want to disclose all your locations by sending emails — TorBirdy works wonderfully!
Torbirdy Update
Note that to use this add-on, you must have Tor installed on your system.
Torbirdy
Torbirdy Alternative
Photo by Braydon Anderson on Unsplash.