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I [ab]use telnet regularly as a debugging tool than its intended purpose. Pretty handy tool to check TCP connectivity.

Yeah it's an easy way to check if a port is responding, and you can actually drive some protocols using telnet.

Eg: `telnet some.http.addr 80` and then type in `GET /index.html HTTP/1.0` and hit enter twice.

You can use it to test SMTP servers too.

Wrong tool for the job. Netcat gives you raw TCP as stdin/stdout without injecting or interpreting control codes.