Telnet to POP Servers

If you're like me you sometimes find yourself without an email client. This wouldn't be a problem if I had a web based email account, but I don't so I must Telnet to my POP server. (port 110 normally)

Your client must use CRLF as its \n

These are the commands:

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USER uid - login as UID
PASS passwd - the password for UID
STAT - get the status of your account
LIST - list the messages in your account
RETR n - retrieve message n
DELE n - tag message n for deletion
RSET - clear changes to your account
QUIT - Quit

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See also: Telnet to SMTP Servers

There's one other POP3 command that it might well be worth knowing if you have to manually check email on a regular basis: the TOP command:

TOP msg n - retrieve the top n lines of message number msg. Note that TOP always returns the headers plus the number of lines you specify, so to retrieve headers only just do TOP msg 0.

I find this one particularly useful when I'm on a slow modem connection and find that one of my friends has decided to send me a 10Mb email from his work account on a T3. You can simply telnet in to the mail server, use TOP to find out whether you've been mailed something good (unlikely) or pointless (usually) and act accordingly.

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Just a quick FYI, the full set of POP3 commands are documented in RFC 1939.