Telnetting into your mailbox
This document describes how to access your mailbox directly using a telnet
program. Normally you shouldn't need to do this but there are a few occasions
when it is useful, such as:
- When there is a badly formed mail in your mailbox that is preventing download of
mail. This should not happen generally, but some junk email can cause
problems for certain mail programs.
- You have built up an excess of previously read mails in your mailbox through having
the "Delete on server" option turned off in your mail program.
You should have your mail program set up to delete mails from the server, otherwise
your mail access will get slower and slower. Eventually you'll have a few thousand
mails in your mailbox and the server will take so long to sort through them to
see which you've read and which you haven't that your mail program will timeout.
The telnet method is to type commands, waiting for a +OK response to each one.
Since the mail server normally only expects to communicate with another machine,
like your mail program, there are no prompts to guide you.
You need to telnet into mail.u-net.com on port 110. Using the telnet supplied
with AmiTCP you simply type
telnet mail.u-net.com 110
in a shell. other telnet programs may work slightly differently.
Once connected you first login to your mailbox with
user mailboxname
pass yourpassword
You should then get a response showing the number of messages and size
in octets (bytes), like this:
+OK yourhostname has 49 messages (262096 octets)
You can then use the following commands, where N is the number of a
message
- LIST
- lists the message numbers and sizes
LIST
1 60288
2 2660
3 1926
4 2214
5 2511
6 1680
7 1816
.
+OK
- RETR N
- fetches message N
- TOP N x
- fetches the headers and first x lines of the message, useful for
seeing if a large message is junk mail
- DELE N
- removes a message
- QUIT
- exits
It is essential you type QUIT to close the mailbox to ensure any DELE
commands you give are executed. Also, you won't otherwise be able to
access it from your mail program, since the server will think you are
still connected to it. The box is released after about ten minutes of
no activity.
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