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I was trying to help some folks inside Iran to download the Tor Browser, so naturally I tried to give gettor a try...

At first, I sent an empty email to gettor@torproject.org which apparently got lost in the void. Then I tried sending an email only with "help" in subject and body of the email. I immediately got the help message emailed back to me:

This is how you can request a tor browser bundle link.

 Send an email to: gettor@torproject.org

In the body of the email only write: <operating system> <language>.

We only support windows, osx and linux as operating systems.

At the moment please only use en as language.

Then I removed the entire body of the email and typed:

Windows English

Again I got the help message. Then I noticed the last line that says currently only 'en' is supported for English. A line I had totally missed (I'm guessing I'm not the only one). So I tried again this time with windows en and yet again what I got in response was the help message. At the end, I had to download the Tor Browser and upload it elsewhere for those users to download them.

After some more trial and error I realized the only way to get the links is if I compose a new email as opposed to replying to the gettor email. This is counter intuitive and makes it almost impossible for everyday users to actually get a working link.

Being censored already sucks, and spending a considerable amount of time to wrestle with a bot to send you the download links to an application so you can finally bypass censorship makes it a lot worse.

I suggest every time gettor fails to understand an email, it should fail back to sending Windows_en links which I'm assuming is the most popular request.

I don't know if anyone is currently working on GetTor but I'd consider this a blocker for a censored user to download Tor.