At University, they’ve blocked ports for all IM applications, including IRC. This sucks, because IRC can actually be really helpful for asking for advice on things such as C++ or C. Also, our computing society has an IRC channel (#wmin-compsoc on Quakenet) and it was a real pain that we couldn’t communicate with members at the University.
I’d seen Douglas Bowman’s “how-to” on secure email using SSH tunnelling and thought that perhaps I could use this to get around the problem I was having. And, I’d be right in thinking that.