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.