inscatolati - Get out of the box! :)

Is fairly easy, just run something like:

/usr/sbin/dovecot --exec-mail pop3 2>/dev/null

if you have enough privileges to read the conf file, you'll be done.

This is useful, for example, if you have a system storing mail in /var/spool/mail, ~/Maildir/ or ~/mbox, and you want to download it with fetchmail, but no official pop3/imap is configured. Get a dovecot binary, a conf file, and configure fetchmail with something like:

plugin "ssh server -- echo +OK; exec /usr/sbin/dovecot --exec-mail pop3 2>/dev/null" auth ssh

Yes, this is a hack, and yes, there are plenty of other ways to achieve the same result. But it works, guarantees an encrypted channel, uses ssh authentication, and doesn't require you to configure dovecot (or any imap / pop3 server) to do authentication for real.