The Tube

The Tube is a tiny and portable software application that you can use to set up encrypted tunnels and transmit data from a client (like a web server or an email client) to a remote server (like a proxy server) in a secured environment via SSH.

It offers support for Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, and others.

Thanks to the fact that there is no setup pack involved, you can drop the program files in any part of the hard drive and just click the executable to launch The Tube. Another possibility is to keep it stored on a USB flash drive to directly run it on any PC with minimum effort and no previous installers. Plus, it doesn't modify Windows registry settings.

Once launched, it creates an icon in the taskbar notifications area and gets minimized there. This way, it facilitates SSH connections in a non-intrusive manner, without showing notifications or performing other actions which would interrupt your normal PC activity.

The interface is quite intuitive, permitting even less experienced users to quickly figure out the works of The Tube. You can get started by creating a new SSH connection in a wizard, by specifying a SSH host and port, user login and password, along with the preferred encryption algorithm between Blowfish, AES and 3DES.

The Tube lets you set up as many SSH connections was you want, edit their properties from the main application window, remove any one of them from the list if you change your mind, as well as easily turn them on and off with one click.

Similarly, you can set up tunnels by entering the local and remote port together with the remote host, edit these parameters later, delete any entry, and toggle their activation status.

We haven't come across any stability issues in our tests, since the app didn't hang, crash or prompt error messages. It had a good response time to user commands and used low CPU and RAM.

To conclude, The Tube delivers a speedy, effective and easy-to-use method for creating SSH connections to send encrypted data over the Internet, and it can be handled by anyone with ease. Too bad that it hasn't been updated for a while.