There's a lot easier than telnet. I think that fetchmail is installed by default, if not it should be easy enough to get. It's a little command that fetches mail from smtp or pop3 servers, and 'mails' it to you on your own computer. As such you need to have sendmail running on your own computer. You can have it firewalled off though, since it's only a local program using it.
You will need a file called .fetchmailrc in your home directory, and make sure that it is not world readable, if you want to put your password in it. You can leave out the password, and then type it each time you want to check your mail.
my .fetchmailrc looks like:
<tt>poll my.mail.server
protocol POP3
username myusername
password "mypassword"
keep</tt>
(The last line, keep, means leave the mail on the server.)
You can have as many "poll" entries as you have mail servers to check, each with their own username, password etc. As always, "man fetchmail" for more info.
After fetching my mail, I use pine to read it - I think I downloaded pine ( from
http://www.washington.edu/pine )and installed it myself. It's pretty pleasant to use, and it's the only app I've been able to get to work worth a darn with pgp.
