I feel like I'm missing something obvious here, but let's go:

Using Thunderbird, I'm trying to use paranoid.email 's TOR settings for my account. The clearnet details work fine, but I want to test the Tor setup out.

Tor is running:

~$ sudo service tor status
● tor.service - Anonymizing overlay network for TCP (multi-instance-master)
 Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/tor.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
 Active: active (exited) since Fri 2020-12-25 12:46:10 EST; 36s ago
 Process: 17828 ExecStart=/bin/true (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 17828 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Dec 25 12:46:10 desktop systemd[1]: Starting Anonymizing overlay network for TCP (multi-instance-master)...
Dec 25 12:46:10 desktop systemd[1]: Started Anonymizing overlay network for TCP (multi-instance-master).

However in my terminal I can't interact with .onion sites (Not sure if I should be able to, for example in Lynx or via ping, curl, dig commands) and Thunderbird is not accepting the .onion mailserver settings despite them being 100% correct, copy/pasted from the email provider.

Another member has confirmed that they do work, so it seems to be on my side.

I'm assuming I need to do something in my /etc/tor/torrc file but I'm not quite sure.

Thoughts on how to get this to work properly?