Notices

Red's Telnets:

This week, I are mostly be telnetting to:

1) Mail servers on port 25 (useful for checking if the daemon is up, and impressing non-computer people by sending them an email from mickey.mouse@whitehouse.gov)
2) FTP servers on 21 (just to keep my hand in)
3) Web servers on 80/8080/whatever (again a quick way of checking if they're up, I guarantee I can do it in less time thatn it takes to open the browser and enter the url)
4) Any number of internal routers and switches. Command line >> web interface. No need for SSH internally.
5) ??????
6) Profit.

Oh, I've been earning money in IT for (counts on fingers - in binary) 26 years. My first paid program was a bubblesort on the Sinclair ZX81 with the 16K RAM pack!

I remember BBS in the early/mid 80's I also remember my excitement when I got my first v22 modem, four times faster than my old v21!

Telnet is also nice to test imap servers. Cannot figure out if it has IMAP IDLE support? Just 'telnet your-server imap' and look at the output.
Oh, and you can log in to your account and check for new mail while you're at it.
http://www.courier-mta.org/imapd.html

telnet-ssl, gnutls-cli or openssl s_client are much better options.

Please tell me you are not running your IMAP servers with plaintext authentication and no SSL/TLS!

While knowing enough RFC3501 by heart to read your mail may be worrying in itself, it's doable (I confess having done it once or twice). But if you can do SASL password hashing in your head you should really see a specialist about it ;-)

Please use your head for a moment. Imap servers are of course set up for external SSL only. On the internal network (depending on type of network) imap w/o ssl may well be available.

Oh well, I guess we just disagree on sysadmin practices. I see no need to ever allow cleartext authentication. The assumptions on the relative security of various network types can change at any time (eg as of last month even WPA isn't secure enough anymore), even on a local wired LAN you can't be sure you are talking to the server you think you are (think DNS or ARP cache poisoning attacks) and I haven't seen an IMAP client worth using that doesn't support either SSL/TLS or SASL. YMMV.