How to use vmail behind a firewall that blocks IMAP

The default IMAP server vmail uses is imap.gmail.com and the default port is 993. If you want to change these values, e.g, because you are behind a firewall which blocks IMAP, you can change these values by adding two lines in your .vmailrc, like so:

server: localhost
port: 2999

Then you can create an SSH tunnel, e.g.

ssh -f [email protected] -L 2999:imap.gmail.com:993 -N

(Thanks to Dave Bolton for this patch.)