Mail retrieval is a simple process, but there are times when you might need to slip into your ISP's back door and have a tinker. For example, when someone sends you a massive file, you'll need to wait for it to download completely before the later ones get through - and what if they accidentally send duplicates?

To add further pain, if you timeout through the big download, you'll need to restart as any previously downloaded messages won't have been deleted from your ISP's mail server. And what if your ISP gets bloody minded and blocks the service because of "over flow"?

Fortunately, there's an old but valuable piece of technology that we can use: Telnet. Using any Telnet client, you can jump directly into your ISP and read or delete your messages before they hit your PC, giving you a bit more control over your mail than Outlook Express allows.

Telnet is a standard Internet protocol for remotely logging into another PC, which in this case, is your ISP's POP3 mail server. We'll use Microsoft's Telnet client which can be accessed from a DOS prompt (Win 9x), or Windows 2000/XP's command prompt.

Getting connected
First up, arm yourself with your ISP's POP3 server address and port number, and your username and password. If you can't remember it, check the settings of your mail client and look for your account's incoming mail settings.
Under Outlook Express you can get to it by going to Tools / Accounts / Mail then double clicking your mail entry and going to the Servers tab. Under Eudora go to Tools/Options and navigate from there.
The port number should be 110, but check under the Advanced tab just to be sure.

With the necessary details handy, connect your PC to the Internet. Running Telnet from the Windows 2000/XP command prompt is command line only, but there are only a few commands we will be using for this.

To open up a connection type the following:
>telnet
>open pop-server.myisp.net.au 110
In Windows 9x, you can also type the above into the Run window from the Start Menu, but it will instead open up Windows' basic Telnet client.

You are in!
Even though you're online and patched into the mail server, you still need to identify yourself to access your mailbox. The following instructions apply regardless of the client you're using. Now enter:
>USER username
>PASS password
If all went well, you now have access to your undelivered mail. Think of it as though you've just walked into the post office where you can now flick through your letters before the postie squeezes it through your mailbox. To see how much mail we have, type:

>STAT
+OK 3 5046806

This tells us that we have three emails waiting which total 5,046,806 bytes. To get more information, type:

>LIST
1 45699
2 1220
3 4999887

This breaks down each message giving it an ID number followed by its size in bytes. Now that we know what's sitting there, we can now read or delete them if we want to. To read an email type:

>RETR 1
Where '1' is the message ID number of the email. You should now be staring at the raw text output of an email message. This can return an obscenely large amount of data so you're better off using the TOP command, which can display a set number of lines from the email. Enter:

>TOP 1 100
This is similar to the RETR command, but by adding '100' after the message ID we limit the result to just the first hundred lines of the email message.
Now that we've checked the mail, we can delete any duplicates, large messages, spam or other unwanted mail that you want to keep off your PC. Enter the following command:

>DELE 1
This tells the server to delete the email with ID 1. Note however that it doesn't delete the message; rather it 'tags' it for deletion. Only when you actually quit from the server do the messages get wiped.

Once you're happy with the changes you've made enter QUIT at the prompt.

So the next time you're having trouble sucking down your email through a crappy dial-up connection, whip open a Telnet pipe to your ISP's mail server and amaze those around you.

To get a list of available commands on your Telnet server just type "?" without the quotation marks.

 

If you want a handy piece of free software to do the setup and command handling window and define a string of accounts we suggest PuTTY from Simon Tatham at www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Contact us for full details of this very economical offer or any other assistance you may need. For a summarised set of detail instructions click here. Pleas note we use pop-up windows so you must disable your popup stopper software first.