About Bypassing Mail Access Restrictions

This post I am addressing primarily to users from Ukraine.

It is called upon to receive and send mail in case of using Yandex, Mail.ru, etc.

So, with the adoption of the already well-known Law in Ukraine , a problem arose for all companies that delegated their domain to Yandex and used its mail hosting.

Recall that the specified resource is in the sanctions list under number 275 .

It must be admitted that the problem is quite severe, since Ukrainian analogues (such as ukr.net, meta.ua, bigmir.net, etc.) do not provide similar services.

Yes, there is Google - but the American giant wants not less, but$ 5 for each box, and if there is a desire to circumvent the 30 GB limit, the amount becomes $ 10 . I note that all of these buns at Yandex were free.

It is clear that the first solution that comes to mind is a VPN - however, in the case of only mail, the additional expenses for a VPN in conjunction with the inevitable decrease in connection speed are not acceptable.

An optimal way was found to solve the problem with a fairly high speed. About him - below.

There are many different free VPN clients on the network. Each of them has restrictions that are removed if paid. We will look at the Psiphon client, which can be downloaded here .

A feature of this client is several modes of operation, one of which includes the creation of a SOCKS proxy, which allows you to redirect traffic from the mail program, but not affect browser traffic.

Unfortunately, this can be implemented only on some third-party clients - Thunderbird, TheBat. The built-in Windows clients - Live Mail and Outlook do not allow you to have excellent connection settings about the system, and therefore it will not be possible to forward traffic to them separately from the browser.

So what needs to be done?

1. Download the Psiphon program , but do not run it.
2. If you use built-in clients in the OS

   
   Run and import the following data into the registry: I tried to include in it the optimal Psiphon settings for work, but note that now all traffic will go through this VPN. Speed ​​will decrease, sometimes significantly. You have to turn on and off the client yourself if you need to work with the network “directly”, for example - you watch streaming video or download torrent.
   Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Psiphon3]
"SkipBrowser"=dword:00000001
"SkipProxySettings"=dword:00000000
"SkipAutoConnect"=dword:00000000
"SplitTunnel"=dword:00000000
"DisableTimeouts"=dword:00000001
"Transport"="VPN"
"LocalHTTPProxyPort"=dword:00000000
"LocalSOCKSProxyPort"=dword:00003039
"SSHParentProxyHostname"=""
"SSHParentProxyPort"=dword:00000000
"SSHParentProxySkip"=dword:00000000
"SystrayMinimize"=dword:00000001
   
   
   
   If you are using Thunderbird or TheBat

   Run and import the following data into the registry: In this case, the system will create a local SOCKS proxy on port 12345. Thus, it remains only to connect mail clients, the rest of the traffic will go directly.
   Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Psiphon3]
"SkipBrowser"=dword:00000001
"SkipProxySettings"=dword:00000001
"SkipAutoConnect"=dword:00000000
"SplitTunnel"=dword:00000000
"DisableTimeouts"=dword:00000001
"Transport"="CoreTransport"
"LocalHTTPProxyPort"=dword:00000000
"LocalSOCKSProxyPort"=dword:00003039
"SSHParentProxyHostname"=""
"SSHParentProxyPort"=dword:00000000
"SSHParentProxySkip"=dword:00000000
"SystrayMinimize"=dword:00000001
   
3. Launch Psiphon. You can drag the shortcut to the program on the desktop or even leave the file itself on the desktop.
4. If you use built-in clients in the OS

   
   Just start the mail client and work. If you do not need to work with mail, close the client and disconnect the connection in Psiphon. Well and vice versa.
   
   
   If you are using Thunderbird or TheBat

   In the mail client settings, specify the connection through the local SOCKS proxy on port 12345. For Thunderbird, it looks like this:
   
   SOCKS4 or SOCKS5 is not important in principle, however, as some TheBat users told me, in this program you should specify SOCKS5 without authorization.
   After that, the mail will work fine. In principle, you can even add Psiphon to autoload if you have all the mail on blocked resources.
   

In principle, this could have ended, if not for “the zeal to fulfill the will of the sovereign”. The fact is that the clause “prohibiting Internet service providers from providing services to users of the network access to resources” (“picking up Internet service providers to access the Internet access to resources / services”) was taken by some providers too aggressively. In total, when sending letters from Yandex to a number of Ukrainian domains, mail is not delivered, because the receiving server rejects connections from Yandex smtp. There were cases (fortunately, rare) when Ukrainian smtp refused to connect to the mailboxes, having discovered that their hosting was on Yandex. If the first case can be fought using the public smtp-relay (for example, I highly recommend SMTP2GO), then the second problem, unfortunately, is insurmountable without moving to another site. At the same time, I emphasize: such a lock is not indicated at all in the text of the Law, but is simply a consequence of either “excessive zeal” or illiteracy of Ukrainian system administrators.

PS Since a bunch of politically-minded comrades ran into the comments, they are very far from the Habr topic, but really want to change the topic in a different direction (thanks to the moderation opportunity!) I will add a couple of links for both Russian users and Ukrainian users . So that there are no accusations of bias and horror stories about the SBU.
Personally, I think it’s idiocy to try to separate the fraternal peoples, to play on this - and even more so to transfer this nonsense to platforms dedicated to IT.