Accessing mail remotely

[Mitch Thompson]

Dotan Cohen wrote:

>On 2/20/06, Mitch Thompson <mitchthompson at satx.rr.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>My personal setup is that I have fetchmail pulling my email off of my
>>ISP's mailserver and storing it in mbox format on my local computer (I
>>have a cablemodem account).  Then, I set up the imapd on my home
>>computer and turned on the SSL port (993). I then forward access to this
>>port through my firewall.  Now, no matter where I am in the world, if I
>>can get internet access, I can read my email.
>>
>>Likewise, if I am on a business trip, I cannot send email through my ISP
>>because I am not on the same domain, so I have set up port forwarding
>>through SSH on my home computer and forwarded its port through my
>>firewall.  If you are interested in doing this, I can send you directly
>>instructions for doing this (essentially, all of my config files, after
>>scrubbing, of course).
>>
>>It works very well, uses SSH/SSL, so it is secure, and I don't ever have
>>to worry about which computer a certain email is stored on, as I do with
>>POP-ping my mail.
>>
>>As a bonus, this method lends itself very well to having a web-based
>>mail system on your home computer (ala Squirrelmail), also accessed
>>securely through https:.  I have done this in the past, but after moving
>>from SuSE to Kubuntu, I never got around to reinstalling and configuring
>>Squirrelmail.
>>
>>Hope this helps.
>>
>>Mitch (reading his home email from work -- oops!) ;^)
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Thanks, Mitch. This seems to be just what I was looking for. How do
>you read the mail over SSL? In mutt/pine? Or do you connect another
>email client to your box and IMAP them to the other client?
>
>  
>
At work, I have Mozilla Thunderbird installed.  Somewhere in the 
preferences settings for your email will be a tick mark for "Use secure 
connection (SSL)"

>Anyone here familiar with Portable Firefox? If I need an IMAP client
>on the machine that I am sitting at, can I whip up a Portable
>Thunderbird (email stored at home- TB ready with my settings in a USB
>drive)?
>
>  
>
Mozilla Thunderbird allows you to install to a local directory and makes 
no changes to the registry, or attempts to put files into c:\Winnt.  
This is good, because I don't have administrative privileges on the 
computer I use at work.  So, I would imagine that if you were to install 
Mozilla Thunderbird and even Firefox to a Thumbdrive, you could 
conceivably be able to plug it into a computer and run those programs 
from the thumb drive with no problem.  Interesting idea....