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Using SSH Tunnels

As discussed in the IC Tech Ref. Document Your Account's Command Line Interface, SSH is the recommended alternative to telnet for interfacing with your account via a command line interface.

The secure method of accessing your account that SSH provides is available to other tasks such as checking e-mail through a process called SSH tunneling.

Here's a good example of using an SSH tunnel to work around Pine's improper support of IMAP. From your local machine, SSH to your account and forward a port on that computer to the appropriate port on the server:

ssh -l USER-NAME -L 1430:LOCAL-IP:143 REMOTE-IP
Password: ******

Note: The local port (1430 in the above example) that you assign can be anything that you want as long as it's not in use. Also, the above does not affect the sending of mail. For that you should use remote port 25.

While that's going, run pine locally, and set your default inbox to be:

{localhost:1430/user=USER-NAME@DOMAIN-NAME}INBOX

You'll also want to set your default folder collections to:

{localhost:1430/user=USER-NAME@DOMAIN-NAME}#allfolders.INBOX.

Congratulations, port 143 (the IMAP port) is now redirected through the secure tunnel created by SSH.

Common port numbers:

143 IMAP - Incoming email via the IMAP protocol.
110 POP3 - Incoming email via the POP3 protocol.
25 SMTP - Outgoing email via the SMTP protocol.
80 HTTP - Web traffic