Tuesday, September 12, 2006 1:55 PM bart

Creating a WCF POP3 tunnel - Part 0 - Introduction

Introduction

Lately I've been quite annoyed by the fact that some hotspots and other public networks block some "common ports", like the POP3 port TCP/110. No worries for a developer who knows .NET Framework 3.0 because WCF will come to a rescue. In this blog series I'm showing you how to use WCF to create a "POP3 over SOAP tunnel".

A short vision document and diagram

Problem
POP3 traffic doesn't pass some firewalls (e.g. hotspots)

Goal
Exchange POP3 traffic over port 80 (firewall-friendly)

Solution
Tunneling of POP3 traffic over HTTP/SOAP using WCF

Diagram

********************LOCALHOST*******************
*                                              *
* +-------------+              +-------------+ *
* | Mail client | -(TCP:110)-> | POP3 server | *
* +-------------+              +------+------+ *
*                                     |        *
*                              +------+------+ *
*                              | WCF client  | *
*                              +------+------+ *
*                                     |        *
**************************************|*********
                                      |
                                (HTTP/SOAP:80)
                                      |
******************TUNNEL SERVER*******|*********
*                                     |        *
* +--------------+             +------+------+ *
* | POP3 client  +-----<==-----+ WCF server  | *
* +------+-------+             +-------------+ *
*        |                                     *
*********|**************************************
         |
     (TCP:110)
         |
*********|********TARGET SERVER*****************
*        |                                     *
* +------+-------+                             *
* | POP3 server  +                             *
* +--------------+                             *
*                                              *
************************************************

Sneak preview

In the next posts, I'm going to explain you how to create the WCF POP3 tunnel step-by-step. However, in order to maximize your WCF appetite, you can watch a webcast over here of the WCF POP3 tunnel in action (no sound due to unavailable equipment over here, sorry for that).

Stay tuned for a WCF adventure!

Some resources

Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Filed under: ,

Comments

# re: Creating a WCF POP3 tunnel - Part 0 - Introduction

Wednesday, September 13, 2006 2:21 PM by denis bider

Hey - everyone knows that the way to do this is to simply use an SSH server. ;)

# re: Creating a WCF POP3 tunnel - Part 0 - Introduction

Wednesday, September 13, 2006 6:47 PM by bart

Hi Denis,

Thanks for your feedback. There is, however, to my opinion no such thing as "the way". The goal of this blog series is to make an SSH-free solution, but more important to show some key concepts of WCF with this problem statement as a starting point.

-Bart, who tries (and succeeds) to live an SSH-free live :-)