Comment 1 for bug 1075093

Did you try restarting Variety after you set the proxy?

I couldn't completely emulate your case, but I made some quick experiments on 12.04 with Variety's url fetching method and it does pass via the proxy when an HTTP_PROXY environment variable is set. When setting a proxy in Ubuntu's Network settings I had to open a new terminal and try again, that's why I assume you need a restart (the environment for an already running application is not changed).

Technical info: Variety relies on urllib2 for http requests, and according to its documentation "In addition, default installed ProxyHandler makes sure the requests are handled through the proxy when they are set." and in the doc for ProxyHandler: "The default is to read the list of proxies from the environment variables <protocol>_proxy."