How to Manage POP3 Email Using the Command Line

Open a command prompt or your favorite telnet client and type in telnet domain.com 110, where domain.com is your email domain such as gmail.com.

Here are the commands to log in:

USER user name
This must be the first command after the connect. Type in your e-mail user name (not the full e-mail address).

PASS password
This must be the next command after USER. Supply your e-mail password.

Here are the commands you can use to manage the account:

STAT
The response to this is: +OK #msgs #bytes Where #msgs is the number of messages in the mail box and #bytes is the total bytes used by all messages. Sample response: +OK 3 345910

LIST
The response to this lists a line for each message with its number and size in bytes, ending with a period on a line by itself. Sample response:+OK 3 messages1 12052 3053 344400.

RETR msg#
This sends message number msg# to you (displays on the Telnet screen). You probably don’t want to do this in Telnet (unless you have turned on Telnet logging). Example: RETR 2

TOP msg# #lines
This is an optional POP3 command. Not all POP3 servers support it. It lists the header for msg# and the first #lines of the message text. For example, TOP 1 0 would list just the headers for message 1, where as TOP 1 5 would list the headers and first 5 lines of the message text.

DELE msg#
This marks message number msg# for deletion from the server. This is the way to get rid a problem causing message. It is not actually deleted until the QUIT command is issued. If you lose the connection to the mail server before issuing the QUIT command, the server will not delete the messages.

RSET
This resets or un-marks any messages previously marked for deletion in this session so that the QUIT command will not delete them.

QUIT
This deletes any messages marked for deletion, logs you off of the mail server and ends the telnet session.