Re: Connection setup for STARTTLS vs. SSL/TLS for POP3/SMTP mail servers?

Peter Pentchev <[email protected]> Fri, 20 Oct 2017 12:07:21 +0300

Newsgroups	gmane.network.stunnel.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 07:01:04AM +0200, Ben Stover wrote:
> In stunnels *.conf file I can specify the mail server name and the port for a connection.
> 
> How can I tell stunnel to use STARTTLS as connect type?
> How can I tell stunnel to use SSL/TLS as connect type?
> 
> Does stunnel support both connect types at all or only one?
> 
> Is the connect type for SMTP completely determined by port e.g.:
> 
> STARTTLS over port 587 and SSL/TLS over port 465
> or can both connect types use both ports?

Take a look at the excellent stunnel documentation (hint: "protocol").

> Assume I do not get the supported connect type information from my webhoster:

This is highly unlikely; how else are you supposed to configure your
e-mail client?  (assuming you are trying to setup a tunnel to your
provider's e-mail server)

> How can I find it out from my (client) side?

Still, there is a way: if you have somehow managed to guess the correct
hostname and port to connect to, you can use "nc -v" or "telnet".
If the port is 25, or if the server greets you with an SMTP banner
(usually "220 something" or "220-something"), then this is a cleartext
connection and you want to set up STARTTLS (you can test for it by
issuing a couple of SMTP commands and then trying STARTTLS).  If the
server just hangs there and waits for you to send something, then it's
probably a TLS connection; you can test for that by running:

  openssl s_client -connect hostname:port

Still, I do indeed find it highly unlikely that your hosting provider
will not have given you enough information.

> What are there error messages?

Not sure what this question refers to.

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev  [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
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