Per application VPN settings on Mac (Snow Leopard)

Question

I use a VPN tunnel to connect to a remote network on Snow Leopard. I set it up with the system settings for VPN and it works fine. Unfortunately, the VPN tunnel is used for all connections. Some ports (like the one I use for IMAP) are not open in the remote network.

Can I use VPN for some applications (like Firefox and Terminal) and my regular connection for others? Is there a third party app to fine tune the VPN settings?

Cheers

Answer 1

Influencing the use of a VPN on your operating system is done typically by the routing table on your local machine.

For example if I want all my traffic to go over the normal internet connection I would setup this as my default route out onto the internet, however if I want traffic to a specific website to then go over my VPN tunnel I will need to setup a static route for this.

In your case I would configure the VPN to be your default route (as it is already) however then add a static route in for your IMAP server via the normal internet connection.