network analyse tool? To debug IMAP related problems

[Chris Hill]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2006, å¼ é~_¡æ­¦ wrote:

> Hello. I would wish to have a tool that would do this kind of thing:
>
>     1. listen on imap port on localhost, connect to localhost with my
>        email client;
>     2. forward the traffic from/to/between real imap server;
>     3. meanwhile, print everything being transfer-ed, so that I can
>        have a good ovewview of server-client conversation;
>
> I don't know what such kind of tool is usually called and thus 
> difficult to do an effective google search. I tried a few tools in 
> ports/net but none of them seems to be working in this way... (admit 
> that I didn't look into pkg-descr of every package)

This sounds like a job for net/wireshark (formerly known as ethereal). 
It won't forward as you describe, but will sit and monitor what goes 
over the wire. You can have it only look at traffic to/from certain IP 
addresses, and/or on certain ports; it's very flexible. You could run it 
on any machine that the IMAP traffic passes through - your local 
desktop, the server, any machine (gateway?) in between.

HTH.

--
Chris Hill               chris at monochrome.org
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