Connecting to a POP3 Mail Server Using Telnet

Leading on from yesterday’s article on how to install telnet on Windows the next thing you need to know is how to access a mail server using it.

This is fairly simply and is standard across all versions of Windows since Windows 95 so you should be covered in most cases. Anyway, this is how you do it:

  1. Hit Window key + R on the keyboard,
  2. Type in telnet <mail server address> 110 (i.e. telnet mail.bigpond.com 110),
  3. Hit Enter,
  4. A telnet window should pop up with a one line POP3 greeting of some sort like “+OK POP3 server ready“,
  5. Type in user <username> (i.e. user boyd.c or boyd.c@bigpond.com depending on how your account is setup),
  6. Hit Enter,
  7. Type in pass <password>,
  8. Hit Enter.

That will get you logged in and ready to do stuff on the mail server. That said, what can you do now that you’re here? Stay tuned for tomorrow’s article where I walk you through some handy stuff including how to delete messages.

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