Stopdesign: Secure wireless email on Mac OS X February 8th

Douglas Bowman over at Stopdesign wrote an excellent article for the not-so-tech-savvy folks on securing your email access for use in public places. Given that wireless internet access is getting more and more popular every day, so should be your concerns about network safety.

After more than a year of implementing my own measures, I think it’s time to help raise awareness of email security. And in doing so, document the way I use SSH to read and send email securely on Mac OS X. If you’re concerned about strangers having open access to your usernames and passwords, and all the email you send and receive while connected to a public wireless network - whether you use a Mac or not - you’ll want to read this.”

During the course of the article, Doug also promotes the freely available SSH Tunnel Manager, an easy to use frontend for the SSH `RemoteForward` and `LocalForward` directives to setup secure port forwardings to and from your local machine.

Just because I was able to help out xal with a related Tip yesterday, you can use the following to alias simple hostnames to complex per-host configuration directives including port forwardings, username mappings and the like in your `~/.ssh/config` file:

Host myhost
  User scoop
  LocalForward 2222 172.16.1.1:22
  RemoteForward 8080 127.0.0.1:80

For the time being you’ll be able to type `ssh myhost` at your Terminal prompt and (given that you setup password-less connections via public keys) you’ll be immediately connected with the configured username and have both port forwardings setup for you.