I'm not talking about webmail accounts. If I have an e-mail address, say john@xyz.com, but don't know any of the particular settings of the server (IMAP, POP3, SMTP) or the port settings, is it not possible to login? Short of asking somebody what those settings are, are there a limited and reasonable number of possible combinations I could go through in a process of trial by error? What are those combos? Is there any way to "ping" that information? Thank you.

I may have posted the question too soon. Couldn't I just send an email to that server, but address it to an account that doesn't exist so that I get the "mailer-daemon" failed delivery message and then find the all the setting info in the header text? Or is there some relevant info that isn't contained in headers?

no, that doesn't work, the "mailer-daemon" message is from the sender's server. fml

riley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I may have posted the question too soon. Couldn't
> I just send an email to that server, but address
> it to an account that doesn't exist so that I get
> the "mailer-daemon" failed delivery message and
> then find the all the setting info in the header
> text? Or is there some relevant info that isn't
> contained in headers?

Most email servers send much less info now for a failed 'bad name' - it is considered a DHA (directory harvest attack) for the same reason you are mentioning and most email spam front ends protect against too much useful information being returned for failures like that now.

If you can’t model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future? - William Happer Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Princeton University

riley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm not talking about webmail accounts. If I have
> an e-mail address, say john@xyz.com, but don't
> know any of the particular settings of the server
> (IMAP, POP3, SMTP) or the port settings, is it not
> possible to login? Short of asking somebody what
> those settings are, are there a limited and
> reasonable number of possible combinations I could
> go through in a process of trial by error? What
> are those combos? Is there any way to "ping" that
> information? Thank you.

If you use an android device you will notice that you can just put in an email address and an account type and many times it will figure out all the correct settings for you other than an IMAP or Active Sync which requires you to know the actual internal server domain name.

If you can’t model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future? - William Happer Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Princeton University

No android device, using outlook express. I guess I'll just have to try different combinations of port settings with either IMAP or POP3 and hope it works.

could someone dumb this down for me? I dont get any of what you are asking, or any of the responses either.

It is this: no you can't get into her account to see if she's getting messages from that guy.