At 11:03 21/08/00 -0300, Eduardo M. A. M. Mendes wrote:
>Hello
> I was wondering if someone could help me to understand a bit more of
>pop servers., specially
>qppoper which I have been using for quite a while.
> For instance, when I configure netscape to read my emails on my
>qpopper server (outside my ISP domain) do I have any kind of security? I
>mean, am I sending a plain text password to the server? Or does qopper
>have any sort of encryption mechanism?
>
> Thanks a lot.
>
>Ed
>
Hi Ed
As you are remote from your qpopper server and concerned about security
including encryption, why not think about using SSH ?
To protect your password you just need to set up SSH port forwarding from
the local machine's pop 3 port to the server's pop 3 port.
This is quite straightforward as you can use for example Tera Term Pro -
which is free and works well as a SSH client - to do the forwarding, and
then you just configure your e-mail client to connect to itself on
127.0.0.1 rather than the actual mail server. Your username and password
get sent down the SSH tunnel for you. Bingo !
(Although it's off topic the same can be done to protect your FTP sessions
but please note that in both cases it is assumed that you have a shell
account on the remote server which also clearly must be running a SSH
server.)
I hope this helps and is of interest to the list generally. Comments
anyone ?
Peter Allen
