I've recently discovered the magic of SSH port forwarding, and it's really cool.
Hosting Matters, my web hosting provider, allows only standard plaintext POP3 for retrieving e-mail. With PuTTY and Pageant (which I use daily for work), I was able to set up port forwarding in less than two minutes. Outlook Express now retrieves my e-mail without sending my account information in the clear, and all I have to do is:
- Start Pageant and give it a passphrase (which I was going to do anyway), and
- Login to my shell account (which I was going to do anyway)
Also, Hosting Matters has a control panel for managing certain things on a site, but it isn't encrypted either. It's possible to get it to work over SSL, but it's not always reliable and it's certainly slow. Since I had port forwarding working, all I had to do was add another forwarded port to the control panel interface, and it's seamlessly encrypted with no real speed hit.
I like it.
