I have friends visiting for a couple of weeks and I would like to help them access their e-mail while here. They are accustomed to using applications such as Eudora or Netscape under Windows to access a POP server. I can provide them with the opportunity to connect the Windows machine to a PPP account here but, because of firewalls, they will not be able to POP the mail directly from their home server. However, my Debian Linux machine can reach outside the firewall and access their home server for them.
It seems easiest then to create accounts on this Linux machine for them and schedule cron jobs that establish a POP connection to their home server, pick up their mail and deposit it in /var/spool/mail. They can then pop their mail from this machine. Does anyone have suggestions on a) does this seem like a reasonable approach? b) if so, what would be good tools for creating such a POP forwarder? I have some experience with sockets under perl if that seemed to be a good way or I could treat this as an opportunity to get more exposure to Java. Both of these methods would take me a bit of time. Is there some tool in the Debian distribution that could do a quick-and-dirty job on this?