How to bypass a blocked pop3 port using SSH.

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So, You are behind a firewall blocking the pop3 port ? No worries

Here's part of my fetchmailrc:

poll foolab.org with proto POP3
user 'XXX' there with password 'YYY' is 'ZZZ' here options ssl fetchall no rewrite

I'll simply change it to poll from localhost:

poll localhost with proto POP3 port 1500
user 'XXX' there with password 'YYY' is 'ZZZ' here options ssl fetchall no rewrite

Now we need SSH to forward between my laptop port 1500 and foolab.org 110
Here's the magic!

ssh -L 1500:localhost:110 foolab.org

localhost is being resolved ON THE SERVER SIDE.

Now the only problem is that SSL will not like it and you'll get something like:

4230:error:140770FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol:s23_clnt.c:567:
fetchmail: SSL connection failed.

I've just removed the ssl option and it's working fine now (Probably it's not needed anyway since fetchmail will negotiate TLS using the "STARTTLS" command) but anyway, we are tunneling over SSH so it's not needed.

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