why telnet and not ssh? telnet isn't even secure.....

seven5,

telnet is a general connection protocol. SSH is a particular protocol (secure shell). It so happens that telnet in the past was commonly used to get remote access to a machine's shell. That was one of the uses for the protocol. But it can also be used for 'tricks' like this, and the HTTP access example I give in my first reply to this thread. In fact, you can connect to just about any open port on a machine. But for many of the protocols, they aren't human read-able (like SSH key negotiations, try typing anything at port 22, it'll just shut down on you), so it isn't helpful to be able to connect to the port with telnet.

email isn't secure

It dosnt' matter if you use telnet or just a pop3 client like eudora...you are still passing your
username and password in the clear. Even if you used ssl ecrypted imap, the login is encrypted from your computer to your isp's pop server but mail from the internet to that popserver isn't encrypted. If you think no one can intercept such mail...go to www.google.com and search on the word echelon.

This is hardly a surprise. mail.mac.com is a POP3 server, and port 110 is the standard POP3 port.

See ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1939.txt for more information on the available POP3 commands to use once you've telnetted.

Also, keep in mind that this is an insecure (plaintext) transmit of your .Mac username/password. Telnet is highly discouraged from a security standpoint, which is why so many mail clients/servers support SSL communication these days.

Keep in mind that this will work with other services as well. Take www.apple.com for example:

terminal% telnet www.apple.com 80
Trying 17.112.152.32...
Connected to a17-112-152-32.apple.com.
Escape character is '^]'.

and if you type:

GET /index.html HTTP/1.0
(enter, enter (twice))

you'll get the Apple homepage echoed back to you. Note that Apple has a timeout on their webserver connections, so you actually have to do this fairly quickly.

-Will

P.S. Another note for the geeks out there. Do a dig on Apple's webservers. You'll note they are actually managed by Akamai, which is why the strange name of a17-112-152-32.apple.com

and akamai is owned by apple

>Authored by: GaelicWizard
>and akamai is owned by apple

That's simply not true. In fact, NASDAQ institutional holdings information suggests they don't even own *any* shares, let alone own the company. I think they're just a customer.

correct. apple was one of akamai's early and large customers. cnn, yahoo, and lycos were others i believe.

Telnet's no less secure than POP3. POP3 (unless wrapped in SSL) also passes username and password in plaintext.

Also, Akamai (which is not owned by Apple) doesn't manage Apple's web-servers. Akamai provides a distributed cache from which content is served, and also provides geographic load balancing thereby moving content closer to the end user (i.e., speeding things up). The original content, however, is still served by Apple's own web-servers wherever they may be.

It's so cute seeing all you Mac geeks dipping your toes into the Unix world. :)

Before you know it you'll be arguing over vi or emacs.

emacs, naturally!

I didn't know there were sadists among Mac users too. BBEdit or vi would be the Mac way. ; )

Great idea for a macosxhints poll, don't you think?

Editor of Choice:
- vi
- emacs
- BBEdit
- TextEdit
- MSWord

(and maybe)

- AppleWorks
- pico
- ee
- vim
- xemacs
- SimpleText

Clearly the only correct answer is emacs, but I respect other people's ignorance. :)

Oh, and for the record, I'm a Mac geek from System 7 days, who transitioned to being a full UNIX geek and never thought I'd go back, until finally Apple caught up, and I'm back to an OSX geek. I'm in heaven!

-Will

Don't forget AlphaTK and, when it is released, AlphaX

Nedit.

emscs? piffle. vi my friend, the only way to fly... emacs, ha. learn to use vi. and learn to use it with out the arrow keys, will save you if you ever need to do tect editing in single user mode.

sorry. had to be said

Three years on Solaris....then mac went nix on me;-)
Maybe you nix folks will see the light about user friendly gui's and ditch xwinders
for aqua ;-) (yeh I know fat freakin chance).

No GUI that lacks built-in remote display capability is going to be perfect for me. The idea that I have to be sitting physically in front of the computer I'm working on is so quaint and outdated that I truly am puzzled by Apple's decision to carry it forward into OS X. Yes, there's software like VNC but Mac-to-Mac communication should Just Work. Click a box or two and >poof<.

good point...except one thing...you can blow x back to your mac running apple's x11...case in point...a couple of weeks ago I had to select my benefits options at work...only problem was I could only do so from a website accessable from my company's internal net. No prob...ssh to my sun workstation and blow a netscape session back across the ssh tunnelto my mac at home....Remote and encrypted....groovy

Nope.

BBEdit. :D


-/-
Mikey-San

In the same spirit, and for the lazy who'd rather not issue all those commands by hand: If you have a *recent* copy of Mozilla, and set it up to access an IMAP account, you can watch the protocol at work by doing the following (that's how they debug the MailNews component). First set two environment variables -- in tcsh:

[localhost:~] fz% setenv NSPR_LOG_MODULES IMAP:5
[localhost:~] fz% setenv NSPR_LOG_FILE ~/imaplog.txt

(you can unset them later with unsetenv NSPR_LOG_MODULES; unsetenv NSPR_LOG_FILE). Then launch Mozilla from the command line:

[localhost:~] fz% /Applications/Mozilla.app/Contents/MacOS/mozilla-bin

(assuming this is where you put Mozilla.app), and go check your mail. This will create a file 'imaplog.txt' in your home directory, which will record the imap session -- you can also watch it unfold in real time with

[localhost:~] fs% tail -f imaplog.txt

(This works only since 1.3alpha or so. In earlier builds the procedure was different.)

check out http://www.nikosoft.net/nswm/
its a very simple but good working solution for someone who wants to check his e-mail accounts from everywhere without installing/using an e-mail client.

Your're just telneting into a pop 3 mail server. This works on any pop3 daemon from BSD to Linux to Sun to M$. Nothing Mac or .mac special about this. It's only really useful if you have a realy large message stuck in your inbox that you cannot download and want to delete.

How 'bout a tip that tells you how to read web pages with telnet (telnet host.name.xxx 80)? Or, for the spammers, how to send e-mail by telnet some.host.xx 25? Or for somthing really weird, telnet to the imap port and read your mail that way (imap protocol is kinda weird).

Agreed. This is probably one of the lamest hints ever to appear on macosxhints. You can telnet to any standard service.

Yes a lame hint. But we all viewed it anyway, right? It serves a purpose though, to expand the minds of the unUnixiated Mac users.

Look I knew that, you knew that, but a lot of people probably didn't. Please read the FAQ for the site and stop flaming people who are sharing what they've learned. It's not incorrect information, it's not misleading so let be!

Right now, it's solely my decision, and I will .always. err on the side of publishing a hint that some view as "easy" or "lame" versus not publishing it. The intent of macosxhints.com is not to only be the home of "super hints" for "super power users," but rather a collection of hints covering all facets of the system, at various levels of "lameness" or complexity.

So it's been around in UNIX forever ... many Mac users, myself included, have at most two years' of UNIX experience, and even then, it's not 100% of my time in the CLI. I knew you could telnet to the mail port. I had no idea what you could do once there. Now I do, and I think it's useful and interesting information...

I do not want macosxhints.com to turn into a place where the simple is chastised by the experts just because it's simple to them -- that's not the type of community that I'd like to see around here. Everyone has something to learn, but if a given hint is too simple for you, please just move on to the next. If they're all too simple for you, then I guess there's no point in reading here any longer.

I can't satisfy everyone all of the time, but if I had my choice, I'd hope that beginners would always feel welcome here...

-rob.

Great point, rob!

Keep up the good work here at macosxhints.com - don't let the "RTFM, idiot" crowd change the friendly Mac community too much. I've been working hard trying to learn a piece of software that is from that crowd (with some wonderful exceptions), and it's not fun banging your head against the wall alone.

and let users ssh to it. You could run pine or elm
and manage your mail from anywhere with anything. Sure,
it's text based but you don't really need all that eye
candy anyway. Now that would be worth something to me.

any updates on this suggestion... i would like to have this feature.

---
sempre in giro