To start testing pop3, we simply type
telnet localhost 110 and should see an output similar to this:
+OK POP3 email.organicbrownsugar.com v2000.69 server ready
and type
quit
to exit again. To see if we actually can read email with our pop3 connection, we will send another email via SMTP. Please repeat the steps listed at 3.2 where we telnetted to port 25 and sent an email to testuser@organicbrownsugar.com. After we did that, we connect again with with telnet localhost 110 and issue the following commands
user testuser
pass usertest
list
we should then see something like
+OK Mailbox scan listing follows
1 708
.
Now we can retrieve the mail by typing
retr 1
Which should display the message in it's raw format. You will probably appreciate an email client here that does not use HTML… Ok, pop3 hopefully works and we quickly see if imap works as well. If you cannot establish a connection to port 110 for some mean reason, make sure your entries in the xinetd configuration file match the proper service name in the /etc/services file and that the executables actually point to existing files! Now lets logout with quit and quickly type
telnet localhost 143
and we should see an output similar to this:
OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4REV1 LOGIN-REFERRALS AUTH=LOGIN]
email.organicbrownsugar.com IMAP4rev1 2000.293 at Mon, 30 Oct 2000 18:47:11 –0500
(CST)
and type
. logout
to leave imap at it's peace. To really test imap you will have to launch your imap cabable email client and connect to the server, at this point I am not listing all the imap commands here which are more complex than the ones used in pop3.
Good! DNS is working, we can send mail via sendmail / smtp and we can read our emails happily with either pop3 or imap4. Wonderful. We're through Lousiana and will now enter Florida. 75%. But wait!