Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'without an ssh login on your mail box' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
without an ssh login on your mail box
Authored by: deeraeya on Jul 23, '03 11:40:36AM
For a long time I didn't have shell access to the machine on which I was getting my email. For example my university email was accessed by POP but I didn't have ssh access to that account. So I thought that ssh forwarding couldn't help me.

But it turned out that it could have. Sure it is not a secure tunnel all the way but it does help with wireless networks.

laptop --- basestation --- wiredbox --- mailserver

If you have a wired-box off the wireless segment which you can ssh to, say your home cable box or an account on a friend's, then you can tunnel so that the wiredbox acts as a proxy to your mailserver - the section between the wiredbox and the mail-server is not encrypted though! So it isn't really all that great but it does protect against the casual wireless sniffer.

Again - the password will be in **plaintext** between the box you ssh to and your mailserver.

This works for me:

ssh -L 11011:mailbox.uni.edu:110 -N sshid@mysshloginbox.com &

This says to forward localhost:11011 -> mailbox.uni.edu:110 _via_ mysshloginbox.com (-N says "don't execute any commands - just forward")

Notice that the difference between this line and the ones above is that there are two different server names in the line.

I had read the "secure pop over ssh" tip a million times before really reading the ssh forwarding syntax. I was pretty chuffed to see this. It can probably be adjusted for SMTP sending as well but I haven't tested this.

This is also very useful for corporate firewall situations in which 110 and 25 are blocked but, by geek demand, 22 is open ;)

[ Reply to This | # ]