Next, you need to find your POP3 mail server. Usually it would be something like mail.your-isp.net. For example: my ISP is netvision.net.il, so my POP3 server is located at mail.netvision.net.il. If you already have an Email client that is configured correctly for your POP3 box, go to your preferences dialog boxes and you should be able to find your incoming mail server address there.

Okay, looks like we're pretty much ready for this. Next thing, we telnet to our POP3 server and into port 110 (the default port for POP3). This is what I get when I telnet into my POP3 page:

+OK POP3 [194.90.1.6] v7.60 server ready

Okay, looks good so far. Now we need to identify ourselves. We need to supply our username and password. Your username would usually be in your Email address. For example: my Email address is barakirs@netvision.net.il, therefore my username is barakirs. So we type:

user barakirs (or whatever username you have)

And the server replies with:

+OK User name accepted, password please

Next thing, we need a password, right? So we do:

pass your-password

And the server replies with:

+OK Mailbox open, x messages (when x is the number of messages you have in your inbox)

Or with:

-ERR Bad login

If we supply the wrong password. Now, we want to see what we have, so we first type list to see the list of Emails we currently have (unless, of course, we have 0 new messages). For each Email, we would get a separate line which will contain a message number (a number that identifies each message) and a number that would indicate the size of each message.

Next thing, we want to read our messages. To do this, we type retr #. Retr stands for retrieve. # should be replaces by the message's number. We would then get a full message header (see Sendmail tutorial) and the body of the message.

After we read the message, we would probably want to delete it. In order to do that, we type dele #. Dele stands for delete. # should be replaced by the message's number.

Once you're finished, type quit to close your session.