Comments on: Testing HTTP/HTTPS through telnet/openssl

By: Kevin Pendleton

Kevin Pendleton — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:50:27 +0000

Testing TLS:

openssl s_client -starttls smtp -crlf -connect mail.hostname.com:587

Force TLSv1:

openssl s_client -starttls smtp -crlf -tls1 -connect mail.hostname.com:587

By: Tommy McNeely

Tommy McNeely — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:22:05 +0000

Also, if your password has some “special” characters in it, it can be a pain with both the shell and perl trying to have their way with it. Here is an example on how to use openssl itself to encode it.

$ echo ‘UserName:P@$$w()Rd!’ | openssl base64 -e
VXNlck5hbWU6UEAkJHcoKVJkIQo=

By: Kevin Pendleton

Kevin Pendleton — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:51:57 +0000

Cool, thanks for pointing out what I did wrong, Mike. Not sure why I was thinking that I needed to crypt it first.

By: Mike Meyer

Mike Meyer — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:13:40 +0000

You’re using to much encryption on your basic auth. Here’s the perl line that works:

perl -MMIME::Base64 -e ‘print encode_base64(“username:password”)’

(yes, the password is plain text that’s just base 64 encoded – it has basically no security.)

By: Kevin Pendleton

Kevin Pendleton — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:43:50 +0000

And here’s the commands to test imap (the test1-3 words are just tags required for imap):

test1 login username password
test2 list “Inbox” “*”
test3 logout

By: Kevin Pendleton

Kevin Pendleton — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:30:16 +0000

To test pop3/tls (secure pop3):

openssl s_client -connect mail.hostname.com:995

Then the usual pop3 commands:

user user@domainname.com
pass password
list
quit