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Thanks for asking this -- apparently there is no really easy tool for this (I was thinking openssl s_client could do this automagically -- apparently not) -- however, see:

http://superuser.com/questions/109213/is-there-a-tool-that-c...

And now I realized I hadn't tuned the SSL ciphers on one of my servers to not accept (among other thing NULL ciphers... at least if that bash-script works -- I'll have to double check).




You should check out https://ssllabs.com. They accept a URL and do SSL checks to determine if your server is not configured in the most secure manner possible.

It is already interesting to run the check against online banking sites to see first hand how seriously they take security in practice. I was surprised to see that some banks score pretty poorly in this regard.


I don't find an option at ssllabs.com to check SMTP (the topic of this thread). Am I overlooking it?


No, you're not. It would be nice if they had one, though.


I'm not sure I'm brave enough to force forward secrecy in my Exim config just yet -- I can't find an option to log handshakes (unless it is logged as part of the message logs -- which can be kept) -- but I suppose refused messages would show up in the reject log.

Still, I'm not sure if I'm even ready to force SSL at all... for incomming SMTP. Sounds like a good way to break your email infrastructure (and reduce spam ;-).

Essentially mail transport is pretty much unencrypted -- I see SSL/TLS having potential to help fight spam by forcing some form of authentication (via DNS sec, CAs etc) -- but not really a useful tool for securing email from snooping -- for that I would advocate S/MIME and/or GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard).




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