Imagine you want to modify some folders in your IMAP mailbox, but you don’t currently have a suitable email client at hand
(and e.g. your mobile mail client isn’t able to create folders).
Fortunately, a command line with telnet/openssl is enough for this task:
Because IMAP is a just a very simple, text based protocol over a telnet-like connection,
you can quite easily create, rename and delete folders this way, and do everything else your email client can.
If you are using a mailserver that supports SSL encryption (which I hope you are!), you can connect to it using
openssl(lines entered by the user are prefixed with❯for clarity):❯ openssl s_client -connect imap.<yourmailprovider>.com:993 -crlf -quiet <SSL certificate verification info> * OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 CHILDREN ENABLE ID IDLE LIST-EXTENDED LIST-STATUS LITERAL- MOVE NAMESPACE QUOTA SASL-IR SORT SPECIAL-USE THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT UIDPLUS UNSELECT WITHIN AUTH=LOGIN AUTH=PLAIN] IMAP server ready <some other information> ❯ A1 login myaccount@<yourmailprovider>.com MyVeryS e c u r e Password A1 OK login completed ❯ <do what you want>The server responds with an initial
OKmessage that tells you which features the server supports. You can then type out your commands, and submit them using Enter. The very first step is to authenticate yourself to the server; after that, you can use all other IMAP commands. When you’re done, just exit the command prompt usingCtrl+C.
A more complete tutorial, including a list of commands, can be found here.