panther, mail.app, and ssh tunnels

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i did a clean install of panther the other night on the ibook… amazing improvement in performance, like a new machine! for the most part, things are working perfectly, especially after i went back in and configured stuff to my liking. looks like there were some under-the-hood changes, as is the case with any upgrade. one thing in particular came up when trying to send email from mail.app.

first off, a bit of background. i host stottsan.com/net (which includes this site, photo.stottsan.net, etc) on a server, and connect via imap/smtp to read/send mail respectively. in order to secure the authentication and data transfer, i use an ssh tunnel that redirects communications to the server’s mail ports. locally, i use 1143 for imap and 2525 for smtp, which means i configure mail.app to use localhost:1143 for imap and localhost:2525 for smtp. it appears that the panther version of mail.app doesn’t like using “localhost” for an smtp server, as i kept getting connection errors. i could telnet to localhost:2525 and connect to the remote smtp server, but mail.app couldn’t make the connection. strange, because imap worked!

tim was having the same problem: w/ an ssh tunnel, imap worked but smtp didn’t. on a whim, i changed “localhost” to “127.0.0.1” and voila! mail sent! changed it back, can’t connect. wonder if this change is a bug or a feature… :)