Hacker zone !!Thrilling but slightly tough for not so techie

Oh yes, we mean it. Glad that you are interested in reading in this article. When there are 10's of popular GUI email clients which will help you configure, your mindset which thinks like a hacker is appreciated. This will be also helpful in diagnosing the issues with IMAP.

Before we start, it will be worthwhile to note that some telnet clients don't support backspaces. Do start over, in case you make any mistakes or typos. Press Ctrl + ] to exit a telnet session. If that fails, may be a Ctrl + C can help. quit command exits telnet and close command closes the connection, and gets you the telnet prompt like telnet >

First Step : Logging in a.k.a the authentication part.

telnet domain.com 143

* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS CHILDREN NAMESPACE THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES SORT QUOTA IDLE ACL ACL2=UNION STARTTLS] Courier-IMAP ready. Copyright 1998-2005 Double Precision, Inc.  See COPYING for distribution information.

eg01 login username@domain.com password

If the entered the right password you will get a response like

egw OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4REV1 LITERAL+ IDLE NAMESPACE MAILBOX-REFERRALS BINARY UNSELECT SCAN SORT THREAD=REFERENCES THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT MULTIAPPEND] User
user@domain.com authenticated

eg01 NO Login failed

make sure that you entered the right pass. If a second try also fails, try resetting the pass from the control panel and try for a third time. If the third try fails, it's time to contact the support. Also any other messages may also needs to be brought under the attention of support technicians.

Second Step : Time to list and read the emails.

For majority of us, IMAP is mostly about folders and support for multiple sessions. For listing the folders, use this command,�

eg02 list "" "*"

Output will be similar to,

* LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" .mailboxlist
* LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" INBOX.Drafts
* LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" INBOX.Snail
* LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" INBOX.Sent
* LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" INBOX.Trash
* LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" Sent
* LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" Saved
* LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" Trash
* LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" sent-mail
* LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" trash
* LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" .cppop.cache
* LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" .cppop.cache.msgs
* LIST (\NoInferiors) NIL INBOX
eg02 OK LIST completed

Now let us select the INBOX and read the emails. As the first step towards it, I am inputting the command as below,

eg03 select inbox

I see the output as below,

* 2537 EXISTS
* 2207 RECENT
* OK [UIDVALIDITY 1093486587] UID validity status
* OK [UIDNEXT 178621] Predicted next UID
* FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Draft \Seen)
* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\* \Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Draft \Seen)] Permanent flags
* OK [UNSEEN 5] first unseen message in /home/egwdemo/mail/domain.com/user/inboxeg03 OK [READ-WRITE] SELECT completed

2207 emails are flagged as recent among a total of 2537 emails. And the flags supported also can be learned from the above response. You can use the fetch command to list the recent emails, replied ones, read ones and like. Let's give you some examples,

Fetching the flags of message #2207

eg04 fetch 2207 flags

Response

* 2207 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent))
eg04 OK FETCH completed

Fetching the flags of messages from 2532 - 2537

eg05 fetch 2532:2537 flags

* 2532 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent))
* 2533 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent))
* 2534 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent))
* 2535 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent))
* 2536 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent))
* 2537 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent))
eg05 OK FETCH completed

eg05 fetch 1:* flags

Output for this command is not included and will be long depending on the number of messages in the inbox.

eg06 fetch 2207 full

Above command will list the full headers of the email #2207

eg06 fetch 2207 body[text]

Actually read the email contents :-) Attachments will be shown as garbage, depending on the filetype.