How to Check Email With Telnet

Checking your email from computers away from home or school is simple using web mail or sites that will retrieve your email and display it on a web page for you. However, sometimes the connection to the Internet is available but use of a browser is not. Telnet is a network protocol, which will allow you to connect to your mail server and read and send email.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Click on the Start button on a Windows based machine. Select the Run option. Bring up a command window by typing cmd. Telnet is a text based utility and works from the command prompt of the operating system.

2. Enter Telnet by typing "Telnet emailprovider.com 110." Place your own email provider in place of the emailprovider.com entry. The 110 is the port that used for telnet communications.

3. Sign into your mail account. Type "USER username" where username is your name on the mail server. Typically this is the portion of your email address before the @ sign. Then type "PASS password" where the password is the password to access your mail account. During this process, you may or may not see the password you are typing.

4. Enter the command to show all your messages by typing "list." Type "retr messagenumber" to view a specific message, where the term "messagenumber" refers to the number shown by the list command for the message of interest.

5. Delete a message from your email account by typing "dele messagenumber" where "messagenumber" corresponds to the message number on the list command.

6. Quit the telnet application and log out of your email account by typing "EXIT." Close the command window.