Refering to my last posting I want to ask a related question: I read in the past somewhere that I can access stunnel from my local email client in more generic way: At first: stunnel always listens AUTOMATICALLY by default on port 127.0.0.1:9999 für incoming request and forwards the prepared/modified request to the outside world. The core parameter are NOT specified in the .conf file but by the User ID which is passed by the local client to local stunnel service. The syntax is as follows: userid=<servername>/<remotes-ssl-tls-port>/<loginname> Example: userid=pop.mail.yahoo.com/995/myname123 So as soon as stunnel receives at 127.0.0.1:9999 an incoming local connect he accepts the following userid string and tokenize it into the three parts. Given these three tokens stunnel is able to connect in the second step the remote mail server WITHOUT any further need of specification in the .conf file. Do I remember this correct? Is this mechanism described somewhere in detail? Thank you Ben