In message <200012180329.TAA13693@spammie.svbug.com> opentrax@email.com writes:
: How is TCP tunneling useful?

It allows you to have a secure connection between two endpoints on the
internet that might not otherwise be able to connect.  I use it to
grab my pop mail from a heavily firewalled server when I'm on the
road.  Just crank up my ssh session to the main machine (with a tunnel
from port 119 on the local machine to port 119 on mail.foo.ba), then
tell my pop client to go to localhost instead of mail.foo.ba.  ssh can
be configured to disallow connections to that port from outside of my
machine, so I have a high degree of confidence that no one else is
using that connection if I'm the only one on the machine.

For protocols like pop where you have plain text passwords, this sort
of automatic armoring is a big win until such time as real
authentication for pop can be implemented and standardized.

Warner