Mail fetching problem

[Roger Grosswiler]

Roger Grosswiler wrote:

> Paul Howarth wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 2004-12-05 at 13:26 +0000, Jim Higson wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> At my university they don't allow pop3 access from outside their 
>>> network, but I can ssh and ftp them. They provide webmail off 
>>> campus, but I'd much rather use a 'proper' client.
>>>
>>> I'm thinking it might be possible to automatically open an ssh 
>>> connection, call inc on their machine (to transfer the mail to my 
>>> remote home dir) then use ftp to copy it to my machine.
>>>
>>> Before I start hacking it up, has anyone done somthing like this 
>>> before or know of any prexisting tools?
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Are you sure they don't provide pop3s (encrypted pop3, port 995) that
>> you could access from anywhere? If that's available, it could save you
>> some hassle.
>>
>> Paul.
>>  
>>
> Do they allow perhaps IMAP? Just try to connect on port 143. It's 
> similar to POP, it just leaves all messages on their server and just 
> loads the header. Messages to read will be loaded on demand, this 
> decreases net-traffic. Just try to connect via imap.
>
> HTH
> Roger
>
another possibility would be, to create a ssh-tunnel on you local 
machine to the mailserver, creating an account in your mailclient 
pointing to pop on localhost, this connection would be forwarded to your 
mailserver, then.

The forwarding via ssh to the mailserver you would do like:  ssh -L 
110:yourmailserver:110

Only disadvantage would be, that you always would need an opened 
ssh-connection to your mailserver, if you pick your e-mails. Advantage: 
you send/receive all data by a secured connection ;-)

HTH
Roger