Tunneling for Mail

Question

Hi Everyone,
I'm down at school now and they have closed almost every port except the typical HTTP ports and telnet and ftp and so on. What's really killing me is they've closed the POP, IMAP, and SMTP ports as well causing my Mail.app not to work.
What I'm wondering is has anyone on here found an easy and effective way to tunnel POP, IMAP, and SMTP through say port 8080 to be able to connect Mailboxes in Mail.
I'm pretty new to networking and there's a lot I don't understand so if there's an easy freeware or you can explain commandline how to do it that would be awesome. I'm dying to get my mail back.
Thanks in advance,
John

Answer 1

Does your school permit secure shell access? If so, here is what you do:
In Terminal.app, create or edit your .bashrc, .bash_login, .tcshrc, .zshrc, and/or .bash_profile, .profile files, whichever you have with names that look like this. To figure out which you have, type
ls -a
Then type
pico {whateverFileNameIsAppropriateGoesHere}
The pico editor is a bare-bones editor, you use the arrow key (or control-v or control-y, as shown at the bottom of the window, to page) to maneuver around in the file. Add a new line that reads
alias myemail='ssh -l {yourSchoolAcctUserName} -L 1143:127.0.0.1:143 -L 1125:127.0.0.1:25 {yourSchoolsEmailServerHostName}.edu'
making the appropriate substitutions for the crap in the brackets. This lengthy command must be on one single line in the .bashrc (or whatever) file, with no line wraps. The single-tick quotes are important, too. Do a control-x, answer y, and press return to save/overwrite the new version. What you have done is just created a unix command shortcut so you don't have to type all that crap out longhand when you need to use it.
If your school account has you secure shelling onto a different host than your email servers, that above shortcut has to be modified a little bit. I'd have to check into the syntax coz' I don't remember it off the top of my head, but your school's IT guy should be able to help you (find somebody that knows something, not the usual clueless students at the helpless desk).
Also, I specified 1143/143 in the above example if your email, inside their network, uses imap; use something like 1110/110 if it is pop. They probably aren't using SSL inside their network, which would be a different set of port numbers still.
If they use SSL inside their network, you would use port 993 for imap and 995 for pop, so I'd use something like 1993:127.0.0.1:993 for imaps or 1995:127.0.0.1:995 for pops.
Now, go into your Mail.app's preferences and specify your incoming imap (or pop) mail server to be 127.0.0.1, using port 1143 (for imap, or 1110 for pop, or 1993 for imaps, or 1995 for pops) for your school account. Do the same thing for your outgoing smtp server, specifying the outgoing smtp server to be 127.0.0.1 and port to be 1125. And of course you'd need to make sure the SSL box was checked for outgoing port 1125 if they are using SSL.
What you will do now is that the next time you launch a new Terminal window, and type "email" you will launch a secure shell telnet session into your school's server and you will have set up port tunneling so that any traffic your computer creates on port 1125 or sees as incoming on port 1143 (or 1110 or 1993 or 1995) will be automagically forwarded to/from your school's ssh server, and to/from their email server. Since it is piggybacked onto ssh protocol, it is all encrypted and secure and it spews out inside their network. So, after launching Terminal and typing the homebrew command myemail and successfully logging into their secure shell server, you will be able to launch Mail.app and send and receive mail. When done with mail, first quit mail, then type exit in Terminal, to end the ssh session,
Hope this makes sense, if you try it and it doesn't work, post back and I'll try to help you one step at a time. Of course, the first thing to do is confirm that your school allows secure shell access.