You know when someone is sure their password is something simple and it just doesnt work. And they are really really sure. You need so many passwords these days, that people often get confused and sometimes they are wrong, not matter how sure they are.

Years ago, when helping out with setting up email, I had exactly this problem.

So I put together a small script that used PHP on a web server to check the common email collection protocols – POP3 and IMAP, testing both the plain text version and the encrypted versions.

Somewhere along the line of changing web servers, hosting, etc, I mislaid the script. Now, it is back!

Click here for the POP3 and IMAP Tester page.

It isn’t pretty, just functional.

Passwords are entered at your own risk, though I don’t plan on collecting them and to be fair, if you are using standard POP3 or IMAP, the password is transmitted via plain text anyway.

Source code is available here.