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POP3 Access using Telnet
With the ever worsening war between the spamers, and the rest of us for control over what makes it into our inboxes, more and more ISP are adding blocks, filters and other defenses to their mail servers, which in turn has led to more mail problems for end users.
Yes really, over the past few months, I have seen a huge increase in users with email problems, and if thats not bad enough, many have been abandoned by their ISPs, which leaves me to deal with the mess (for my clients anyway). My primary test to confirm the issue is not at the users end, is to access the mail server via telnet, which removes the mail client from the long list of possible problems, and gives the poor victim more ammunition to use when dealing with their ISP.
This very brief tutorial covers, with many examples exactly how to access your ISPs mail server with telnet. Now while all the development and testing has been in the UNIX/Mac world, so although its not tested, it should work under Windoze. Anyway if you have success under windoze please let me know and I will update this page.
Step 1. Establish the connection.
The first thing to do (as if you needed to be told) is to establish the connection, which you do like this.
telnet pop3.isp.com 110
This will connect to the pop3.isp.com (yes you need to replace this with the real name of the server you are trying to connect to) on port 110 which is the POP3 mail port. Almost forgot with Windoze telnet client you may like to turn local echo on, make it easier to see what you are typing.
Step 2. Authenticate.
Authenticate like this. The server will not give you a nice simple to use login prompt, so you need to do the following.
user yourusername
after entering this the server should respond with something like this.
+OK User name accepted, password please.
to enter the password type the following
pass yourpassword
After this the server should respond with something like this.
+OK Mailbox open xxx messages.
At this point you are authenticated OK. One thing to note is the +OK this is one of the two possible returns from the server and as you can guess means all is well, the other one is -FAIL, and I am sure you do not need me to go into what this means :-)
Step 3. Common Commands.
Now you are authenticated, you can use any of the following common commands, to check out the connection to the server. I usually start with the stat command, which as its name suggests displays the status of the mailbox, then move onto list etc.
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Command
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Functional Description
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LIST
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Lists the messages in the mailbox together with their sizes. also can be used with the message number to return specific message sizes.
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RETR messageID
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Retrieve the message specified by messageID, displays it to the screen.
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DELE messageID
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Delete the message specified by messageID.
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RSET
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Undo any changes made.
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STAT
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List the number of messages and the total mailbox size.
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QUIT
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Close the connection.
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Links and Related pages
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