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I am not sure if this is a correct platform to ask but as I find this question almost similar to my problem, that's why I am posting it here.

I have a mail account set at myname@mail.institute. But the server mail.institute is not accessible from outside the institute's network, except for a dedicated frontend website they plugged in.

The problem is I cannot sync that mail account in my Mail client apps like Thunderbird, Gmail, outlook etc. unless I am inside the Institute.

The specifications that works for mail clients (Gmail App) inside campus:

Incoming Setting: server: mail.institute, port: 143, security: None.

Outgoing Setting: SMTP server: mail.institute, port: 587, security: STARTTLS.

Luckily, they provide a machine say A, which is accessible from outside (thus we can access any machine inside institute using ssh after ssh-ing this machine A) .

Can I setup some settings in some existing mail clients (say Thunderbird, but Android settings is more preferable) which will transitively use machine A to sync my mails from outside the campus?

Debanjan Dutta
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If you can ssh to the machine A, then you should be able to setup ssh tunnels to the server mail.institute over that machine (unless they blocked connections from machine A to mail.institute). Use for example the following command:

ssh -L 6000:mail.institute:143 -L 6001:mail.institute:587 machineA

and then set up your mail client to use localhost port 6000 for incoming mail and localhost port 6001 for outgoing mail.

You can change 6000 and 6001 above to whichever ports you want, as long as no application uses them on your local machine.

Of course this will work only during ssh session being active.

raj
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