Arch Linux

killerwhale

Member

Registered: 2006-01-05

Posts: 6

Automatic SSH tunnels for email

Here's a quick little question for the ssh wizards out there.

I have a PC running Arch in my apartment, let's call it house, and a laptop with Arch that I carry to campus, remote. I have getmail and courier configured on house to fetch emails from all my accounts and serve them up via IMAP. I use ssh and mutt to check email when away from home, but I would like to use claws mail on remote. Right now, I just use ssh to tunnel a port between house and remote. I open a terminal and manually issue this command each time I check my mail:

ssh -l username -L 7777:localhost:143 -N house

House is behind a NAT firewall, so I'm tunneling through a single port. This setup works fine, but I would like having to avoid manually starting and killing an ssh tunnel each time I check my email. Is there any way to exploit the functionality of ssh, claws mail, or another program to accomplish this?

Thanks!