Getting email remotely

[Matthew Carpenter]

That would depend on your email client and server.

My choice would be running COLS for the email server (which includes
stunnel) and Sylpheed for the email client on a Linux box.
COLS can be configured using stunnel to provide SMTPS and by default
offers SPOP3 and SIMAP (these protocols through an SSL tunnel), which
Sylpheed and KMAIL (with KDE3) support.  These ports are 465, 995, and 993
respectively.


If you are using some Windows client, these things don't matter anyway
since their version of security is not to touch the machine (ie. I don't
know of any session-encryption schemes used by Windows email clients-use
PGP).  In this case, you can use any linux(*nix if desired) box and use
standard SMTP, POP3 or IMAP, using ports 25, 110, and 143 respectively.

If you offer services for mixed clients (some Linux, some losers) I would
do both arrangements on a COLS or any other distro which includes stunnel
and shows you how to use it (stunnel, obviously, works on all distros, but
the one in COLS comes ready-made and with default configs which are simple
enough to change for whatever protocol you want to tunnel).

I use SMTP and IMAP (secured) exclusively in a setup much like yours.  I
pull email from yahoo.com and a couple other accounts and have my server
act as the central server.  I could do this other ways, but this provides
me with fast, secure access with some failover since if my box or
connection goes down I still have the other services which collect the
mail for me.

good luck and have fun!
Matt


On Tue, 18 Jun 2002 08:05:31 -0400
"Brian Witowski" <brianw at torchlake.com> wrote:

> Howdy,
> 
> I use a linux box as an email server.  It running sendmail.  I also have
> Fetchmail running which goes out and retrieves mail from two seperate
> POP3 accounts and dumps them in my local linux accounts.
> 
> My connection is dynamic but IF I knew my IP address, what would be the
> easiest/best way to read my email from another location?  Which ports
> would I have to open up?
> 
> Thanks,
> Brian
> 
>