Mysterious connection problem and resolution

This was weird. 2 days ago my connection to a company IMAP server simply stopped working. To cut a long story short, after lots of trying and head-scratching, I could at least identify the problem at its roots: whenever I telneted to a working port of the IMAP server (it has webmail too, etc) I was faced with an empty screen, and after the first keypress, the connection dropped.

Now I use a Windows XP laptop through a wifi router for work, I don't want to get into details why, it's just given. I tried to locate the source of the problem: trying from a remote server works OK. Trying from connecting the laptop to the router instead of wifi: NOT OK. Trying from the home linux server connected to the router: OK. Trying from Knoppix on my laptop: OK.

Shit, the problem's in the networking part of Windows XP. Hell, all I need now is a reinstall... like I'd have time for that. But I had an idea: if the stuff works from my server, why don't I try to tunel the IMAP traffic through it? Why not - besides the fact that I've never done anything like that before.

But surprisingly it worked like a charm, thanks to this guide. You might want to turn on compression and ask putty not to open a remote shell, since you're not using the ssh connection itself, just for the tunel. When set up, I started the tunel, and asked my IMAP client to connect to localhost:143 - and voilá, after all the struggling, I have a faster and a bit more secure connection now. Phew.