Louis Kruger Reporter
	Description • 22 years ago

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030405
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030405

Looking through the bug list, it seems that lots of people use ssh forwarding to
connect to protected mail servers.  I think it would be very useful if this kind
of connection was treated as a 1st class citizen by the mail/news app.

The idea is to allow some configuration options to let Mozilla automatically
setup the necessary ssh forward when it connects to an ssh server.  This could
be done, for example, by linking Mozilla with the OpenSSL library.  Some glue
code to setup the tunnel and UI in the mail/news setup menu to configure this
automatic SSH tunneling would round out the feature.

This has several advantages over setting up the tunnel manually:
1) Don't have to configure the server to be "localhost" which makes no sense.
2) Could have multiple secure connections to different servers defined
simultaneously.
3) Don't have to have any open listening ports at all on the localhost machine.
4) Don't have to manually setup and take down the tunnel each time you want to
check your email.

Having this feature would make using SSH to access mail securely as easy as
using SSL.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
n/a RFE
Actual Results:  
n/a RFE

Expected Results:  
n/a RFE

	Louis Kruger Reporter
	Comment 1 • 22 years ago

Just to indulge in a little "blue-sky" thinking, having tight SSH tunnel
integration in Mozilla could be useful in other ways too.  Consider:

1) Having SSH tunneling as a 1st class proxy type.  Imagine using Mozilla to
browse inside a corporate firewall through an SSH gateway.  Each page request
automatically sets up a temporary tunnel.

2) This could even be combined with a way to allow different proxy settings for
different domains, to allow browsing multiple protected networks at the same time.

3) To make Mozilla able to browse and transfer files on remote filesystems
though SSH as easily as through FTP.

Just some ideas off the top of my head.  Maybe some developer will find this
interesting.  One can dream.  :)

	Andrew Taylor
	Comment 2 • 22 years ago

It should be possible to use mozilla's own NSS for SSL here, I think.

	John Drinkwater (:beta)
	Comment 3 • 16 years ago

Bug 318481 & Bug 136129 could probably do with being linked to this somehow, though if anything this is a dupe of bug 136129.