[Dovecot] Manual login to SSL-protected port?

[Ron Leach]

List, good afternoon,

Dovecot and mail clients work fine.  Several recent postings mention 
trying telnet to check this or that and, since I was considering using 
a spreadsheet plug-in to analyse some mail statistics by directly 
connecting to the server, I thought I'd try to test what the command 
sequence was that I might be able to use, and what message data was 
available (headers etc).

We use only SSL-protected ports.  Is it possible to manually login to 
dovecot when dovecot uses SSL-protected imap ports?  I've tried telnet 
and the

  telnet localhost 993
  login user pass

resulted in connection closure, as I (think I) would expect because 
telnet doesn't use SSL (does it?).  I checked

  man telnet

and it described authentication options but when I tried

  telnet localhost 993
  auth enable ?

to check what auth protocols it allows, the connection closed.

I tried SSH but it just 'hung' - presumably SSH expects an SSH server 
at the other end, not dovecot.

Is it possible to manually login to a dovecot SSL imap port?

regards, Ron