Life with no mail client-here's my comments on how and why.

[Bradley Hook]

Depending on how technical you want to get, you can't really access
email without some sort of email client or mail user agent. Something
has to retrieve the mail from the server, and some consider a human
typing protocol commands directly into a terminal to be a "client" of
sorts. You could possibly call it "life with no software client
specifically intended to handle email."

On the telnet issue: a telnet client does work, though nc is a much
better choice. I have yet to run into a POP3 or SMTP server that will
choke on telnet terminal negotiations, which telnet clients send but nc
does not. Since a telnet client is a little bit more common on standard
OS installs, I have seen it commonly used for dirty troubleshooting of
services like SMTP and POP3.

But seriously, shouldn't you be accessing your mail over non-plain-text
protocols that you can't get to with the likes of telnet?

~Bradley

Luke -Jr wrote:
> On Friday 04 January 2008, David Nicol wrote:
>> On Jan 4, 2008 1:24 PM, Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins at tarcanfel.org> wrote:
>>> There are those who use emacs as their mail client.  I suppose one could
>>> come up with a way to use cat and vi to read and edit, and you wouldn't
>>> really call that using a client.  _That_ would be life with no mail
>>> client.
>> you could just telnet to your POP3 and SMTP servers; that would be
>> using the telnet e-mail client
> 
> I don't believe either POP3 or SMTP support the Telnet protocol.
> So using a Telnet client *might* work, but that is a coincidence from the 
> simplicity of the protocols involved.
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