Use Telnet To Login To Exim SMTP Server, Perform SMTP Authentication, & Send Email
If you are a system administrator you probably manage one or more email servers so things eventually will go wrong and need to be resolved as quickly as possible. It is beneficial to know how to troubleshoot email servers using telnet via a shell so you don’t have to rely on a GUI mail client. Below I describe how to login to an Exim email server using telnet, authenticate via SMTP authentication, and then send test emails. The below examples will be run from a terminal window on Linux however they should be very similar too running the commands from a Command Prompt on Windows 7 or any other operating systems using a terminal window or similar.