Encrypted Communications with Stunnel

Stunnel is an SSL encryption wrapper that allows what are normally plain text and insecure communications to be encrypted during transmission. Stunnel recently went through some major changes and the current version (4.x) has a completely different architecture than previous versions. In this article I will be dealing exclusively with the new version.

One of Stunnel's most common uses is encrypting communications between POP or IMAP mail servers and e-mail clients. Both of these protocols require users to authenticate themselves with a username and a password.