Re: pop3

[Rob Hudson <rob@euglug.net>]

> On 20010729.2024, Pedro Zorzenon Neto said ...
>
> On Sun, Jul 29, 2001 at 02:13:17PM -0600, Moe Harley wrote:
> > Thought i'd ask what the general opinion is on the most secure pop3 daemon.
> > I need to install a pop3 damon on my debian machine, but I wanted to get a
> > good idea from you guys on which one to install.
> 
>   I don't know about ssh, but there should be some pop over ssh/ssl service that is safer.

I currently have fetchmail opening up a SSH tunnel, and get my mail
via popa3d.  I'll attach relavent scripts...

/home/user/.fetchmailrc:
-----------------------
poll cogit8.org via localhost protocol pop3 port 12574:
  preconnect "ssh -C -f -L 12574:cogit8.org:110 cogit8.org sleep 10"
  password <your_password>;

I guess that's it.  This basically says, 

preconnect (do this before fetching mail) 
open a SSH channel from server cogit8.org port 110 to localhost port
12574 (arbitrary port number), wait 10 seconds for fetchmail to get in
there.

then,
fetchmail on localhost port 12574.  

If the tunnel ends -- the 10 seconds is up, the tunnel will stay open
until no more bits are flowing thru it.

The password in the .fetchmailrc file is your pop/login password.  It
is sent encrypted since you tunnel it thru the SSH connection.

One thing I did was put my identity.pub file in my
~/.ssh/authorized_keys file so that fetching my mail didn't require me
to supply a password for SSH to open it's tunnel.

Oh, and I chose popa3d simple because the email server at work used
the same pop daemon.

-Rob