Hacker News Reader

Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

Wanting to know how email worked and then stumbling on it being mentioned next to the relevant RFCs was my first exposure! You could easily check pop3 mail over telnet, by sending all the commands by hand. HELO!

I then made my first email client, then an RFC later, and after browsing the web through telnet for a while, made my first web server!

View on HN

I think I was the only one in the operations team who knew how to use telnet to check connections and existence of adresses on company and outside email servers. As well as other low level tools to diagnose problems with Windows PCs and servers. There just weren't any gui tools like that.

I have checked right now that Multi-User Dungeons we played in the 90s, still exist and are played. 35 years later!

Telnet or Mudnet client needed :)

I’ve just poked my schoolmate - he almost didn’t graduate because of MUD.

MUDding both taught me programming and pretty well wrecked my schooling, although in fairness, I didn't take college very seriously. Never finished my degree, which I now regret.

But you know TCL :)

Why do you regret it? People 40+ and juniors can't get jobs now anyways. Even with proper degrees.

These were lpmuds, so I know object-oriented C.

I know things are brutal out there, but if I find myself unemployed, I’ll need every possible edge I can find. Homelessness is decidedly suboptimal.

During the Summer of 1997, I stayed at my university and had a job at the computer lab in the basement of the library. We had four Windows 95 PCs, four Mac Quadras, and then tons of VT terminals. I specifically remember the one at the lab assistants desk being a VT-320. Anyway, it was enough for me to telnet to BatMUD. I got all the way up to level 32 or so (and made some friends!) before I stopped playing. Man, that was a great Summer. Well ... it was great until I got cheated on but that's a whole other story. :-p

I fixed a client’s Outlook many years ago with telnet. The app just wouldn’t download email. No error.

So, with the guy looking over my shoulder, I telnet to the email server, list his messages, and discover that there’s an email with an attachment that’s too big for Outlook to handle. Read some basic info from the message so he could confirm that deleting the message was fine - deleted the message, and Outlook worked again.

Dude was thrilled. Fun times.

Telnet was among my debugging tools for web applications.

And sending an email without line editing felt much more exciting than a dedicated mail client. Just dig the remote MX, telnet to port 25 and do it by hand. Marvelous!

I vaguely remember using telnet to debug nodes from behind load balancers. I would ssh to the load balancer ( just a freebsd box with Apache ). Then telnet from there to port 80 on one of the app servers and issue get requests (including headers) by hand to see what the loadbalancer was seeing in the responses. Very tedious, I can't remember why but i do remember a BOF literally standing behind me and forcing me to do this with telnet and not something like curl/wget.

EHLO! You're definitely not alone on this RFC path ;-)

sending email over telnet was part of my training as tech support for a dial-up ISP.

Back in 1991 the older students showed me how to telnet to port 25 and make my "From:" email address be anything. It was funny when the person sitting next to me received an email from satan@hell.gov

My very political grandpa definitely received a few emails from the "president", along with a few email from a "government agency" following up on the emails.

Hey. That was a gateway drug for teenage 'hackers' hehe

I remember grex.org and arbornet.org . My first free Unix shel acccounts hehe. Made friends worldwide.

Grex only shut down recently, in 2023.

I hate to be that guy, but HELO/EHLO is smtp, not pop3

I stand corrected! In my defense, it's definitely been a long while. ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com