Or, will less zeros ....

tcping -t 1 imap.gmail.com 993    :-) :-)

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Specifically what's going on here is that fedora netcat is not the old netcat you know.

A little while back (I don't remember which release) it was replaced by nmap netcat (ncat):

[root@server ~]# rpm -qf /usr/bin/nc
nmap-ncat-6.01-9.fc18.x86_64

http://nmap.org/ncat/

This does not have the old -z option as you mention... tcping is the best of the options others have presented (no idea what that person was going on about netstat for...)

The other alternative to tcping is nmap ...

nmap -Pn -p993 imap.gmail.com