I'm looking for a special email client for the purpose of doing testing of mail servers. I need to be able to test:

1. Shell command line capability. If it also can do X windows, I need a version that does not need X libs (maybe build that from source). Source code would be nice to have.
2. Access to POP, IMAP, SMTP, and both SSL and STARTTLS variations. I do need all these variations.
3. I need to be able to specify the login name, email address, and server hostname or IP address, and optional port number to access.
4. It should prompt me for password if I don't supply it in some other means (one of command argument, environment variable, or file I point to).
5. It should report how much mail is there if it can get in but NOT actually fetch it (options to tell it to fetch mail would be optional, but I don't need that).
6. If it cannot get in, it needs to detail why as much as can be determined ... and NOT phrase things for ordinary users.
7. I do NOT want to have to "setup up an account" in the client to use it. I would be using it to, among other things, verify that access to accounts being set up on servers is actually working.

Anyone ever heard of such a beast?

That's very specific

Alpine, maybe? There's a debug option mentioned in the command line options. The source is available. It comes with something called mailutil which I think might do at least some of what you want. I once used it to script sucking email out of one account via and in to another via IMAP.

Well, I'm not looking for a new mail client in the usual sense. But if the alpine package has tools, or just the right set of command line options, to carry out the testing I need to do, then that might be what I want. I'll take a look at it (again ... looked at it several years ago once for ordinary client needs but ended up using mutt and don't remember the specifics of why).

How about telnet?
http://techhelp.santovec.us/pop3telnet.htm

Kind regards

FWIW, I just found that script I mentioned. Here's an example line which might give you a vauge sense of what can be done with mailutil

$where is a path to a local directory.

Given that you seems to know exactly what you want, if you have some scripting/programming skills it might be worth looking at writing something to do what you want. Since my last post I've remembered that about five years ago I wrote a script in PHP that connected to an IMAP sever and retrieved the size of all the user's mail folders. I'm sure such a thing is possible in other languages too.

Well, telnet would be far from it. It wouldn't all be on one command. You'd have to do separate "commands" for each line of the protocol. The IMAP protocol is more complex than POP (and the one I need most). And it would be really hard to do the SSL and STARTTLS stuff (what I need most).

What is the local directory defined by $where for?

I don't want to save any state at the machine I execute this from. The only need I can see for some directory is for a collection of CA certs (that I can add my self-signed ones to) to verify SSL key authenticity. And LIBSSL I believe has a tool for that much, anyway (if that's the only test I want to run at that moment).

Yes, that is the fallback plan. I can program in C and have some ability in PHP, Pike, and Python. But it is always wise to check, first, to see if someone has already done so. Inventing a wheel can look rather embarassing

What I want is basically a tool a mail system administrator can use to test if user access to a mail server is working ... without munging up their real mail client's account base with a temporary account ... and without having to deal with a bunch of different mail account configuration settings to see which works. The ideal tool will try that account in many variations to see what works. Whatever port it is directed to, it should try to autodetect which protocol (POP vs. IMAP) is there. And that's after connecting in the clear, in the clear with STARTTLS, and fully encrypted with SSL from the start. It should also try the username alone, and the username appended with "@" and the full hostname, and also with just the domain part of the hostname. It would report back what works and does not work. It would report failed to connect, failed to authenticate host, failed to login, mailbox empty, number of messages, as appropriate. Ability to use proxies (like HTTP CONNECT and SOCKS) would be nice.

Do you see where I'm going with this, yet? I want to do something like:

... and out pop all the answers.

It was a local collection of mail.

I don't want to save any state at the machine I execute this from.You can always put stuff in specific tmp directories and clean them up afterwards.


Depends how cool the wheel is.

Sort of but I suspect, not really.

I don't see at all where to put the username, hostname, portnumber, and password to access the selected mail server for the tests. And I don't file any "mailutil" program in packages for Slackware or Ubuntu. The closest package is "mailutils" but that's the classic MH client.