Command-line SSL ?

[Philip Herlihy]

A friend was having email problems recently. In the situation at the
time I'd normally try telnet to port 110 on the POP3 server, but his
service provider stipulates an SSL connection to port 995. I did get a
telnet connection on 995, but couldn't do anything with it (hardly
surprising).

Is there a way to run the necessary layer at my end so I can send POP3
text commands from a Windows command prompt? Or am I just showing my
lack of understanding of SSL?

Phil, London

[Philip Herlihy]

Looks like OpenSSL is the answer!

Phil

[Noah Davids]

Try Stunnel at http://www.stunnel.org/. You will be able to create an
SSL session to the server and then telnet to a local port with all
characters typed sent to the server over the SSL session and characters
received from the server sent back to the telnet client.

[Philip Herlihy]

Thanks - I'll look into this.

Phil

[Todd H.]

Philip Herlihy <thiswillb...@you.com> writes:

2 options

stunnel or
openssl s_client (if on windows, the cygwin.com framework can install openssl for ya)

But... all I bet your buddy really needs is to poke the button in his
email client's POP3 server configuration settings to use SSL encryption
for the POP3 server.

That usually (in a sufficiently clueful email reader) jump the default
tcp port number for POP3 up to 995, and things iwll probably just
work. There's a client out there that doesn't automagically chance
the port number when you specify encryption... not sure if it's
Thunderbird or Outlook or if both fixed it now.

--
Todd H.
http://www.toddh.net/

[Philip Herlihy]

Thanks, Todd - more entries for my ever-growing Favourites.

In fact we did resolve it - server name was wrong - but I've been
interested to look into these suggestions nevertheless. Cygwin, eh ..?

Phil