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