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.