I love cool tech tips. The following tutorial is for POP based email that you get from your ISP, and will not work with web based email like Hotmail or Yahoo. This is technology information at its finest and way cool.

There are a few reasons why you may need to telnet into the POP server for example, deleting a message that that isn’t downloading correctly into your mail client, which is therefore preventing you from accessing your other email. Another reason may be that you want to delete a specific message from the mail server, while leaving other message  untouched.

1. Click -> Start -> Run
2. Type Telnet -> Click OK -> You will See this window
3. Type what you see in the image, substituting your pop server name for the one you see on the screen. Basically, you will type the following: o pop.yourserver.com 110 (You replace only the word pop.yourserver.com) .
4. Hit Enter. You will then see a message like the following: +OK hello from popgate 2.40 on pop3.myserver.com
5. Type: User username -> (substituting your user name for the word username) Hit Enter
6. You will see something like: +OK password required -> type: pass yourpassword (substituting your password  for the word yourpassword) Hit enter
7. you will see something like: +OK maildrop ready, 4300 messages (245844367 octets) (244490215)
   

Step #7 is showing you logged into the pop server. From there you can play around with POP server commands. A word of caution, if you delete a file from the POP server, it’s gone forever after you send the quit command. The del command followed by the message number will delete that specific email message that you want to get rid of, for example: del 1 will delete the first message.

The following are the most common POP commands:

USER <username>
PASS <password>
STAT
LIST
RETR
DELE
RSET
TOP
QUIT

I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about this cool Telnet tip, and hope you pass this technology information along to your friends.

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