Ever want to be cool and check your web-mail at work without having to go to the stupid bulky web client to do it? There are several ways around this. Some providers, like gmail provide pop3 access. However, many do not, and even if they do, most corporate firewalls block you from using it. However, if you use the HTTP (aka web) protocol, then you can most likely circumvent the firewall, as it sees you as just using the web.
There are a couple different free tools that can achieve this. By far, the most comprehensive is FreePops. FreePops can be installed as a service and run in the background. It is very simple to configure an account using FreePops. You simply enter your username as the full email address. FreePops will know which connection module to use based on the domain of your email address. Then you specify the pop3 server as localhost:2000 or 127.0.0.1:2000. 2000 is the default port and you can change it if you wish.
FreePops does not provide smtp access and has limited features out of the box, but it does work well. This brings me to the second tool I like to use. It’s called YPops! and it is exclusive to Yahoo web-mail. However, it includes SMTP access and has a couple more features that come in handy. For instance, you can limit the amount of mail that gets downloaded, or set it to download new messages only. This is nice for me because I’ve had my yahoo account for a long time, so I don’t want it to download all the messages when I connect, just new ones. The defaults for it are:
Pop3- localhost:110 or 127.0.0.1:110
SMTP- localhost:25 or 127.0.0.1:25
I’ve got Hotmail and Gmail configured through FreePops and Yahoo configured through YPops; all in fetchmail. They all go to the same “Inbox” via procmail and then I can read them with Pine. For more information on configuring Pine with procmail and fetchmail, see Jeff’s post here.
My .fetchmailrc file
set daemon 180
set postmaster "eokuwwy"
#polls ypops; default port is 110
poll localhost protocol pop3
user '
#polls freepops
poll localhost protocol pop3 port 2000
user '
#polls freepops
poll localhost protocol pop3 port 2000
user '
Additionally, I appended an alias to my bash profile that makes use of the MailUtil program that you can get for Pine. It can be found here:
http://www.washington.edu/pine/getpine/pcpine.html
This simply checks my Inbox to see if there are any new mails. That way, I don’t need to keep a mail client open all the time.
export WIN_MAILPATH="C:\\devtools\\cygwin\\var\\spool\\mail\\eokuwwy"
alias mail="mailutil check '$WIN_MAILPATH'"
mailutil is already installed in a directory that’s included in the $PATH.
Well that about does it. Happy popping.
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2 Comments
if a corporate firewall is blocking pop3 access, chances are it’s doing the same thing with IMAP. all the same, i didn’t realize pine works with imap until recently, as does gmail, once it’s enabled.
inbox-path = {imap.gmail.com/novalidate-cert/imap/ssl/user=rtc@gmail.com}inbox
smtp-server = {smtp.gmail.com/user=rtc@gmail.com/ssl
when you delete an email in pine via imap, gmail archives it.
Interesting however in most setups where public mail is blocked, user doesn’t have admin privileges to install and 90% of the time it’s a windows machine for the developer. Now, the only solution could be an eclipse plugin which does all this silently over http. (eclipse plugins can be installed over the internet without admin privs).
Any tools for the same?
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