[TriLUG] SSH port forwarding and netfilter

[B Smith]

Here's the question. Say I'm connecting to a remote IMAP server that 
also runs SSH, and I want to forward all of my traffic through an 
encrypted tunnel. From my local client I would issue something like 
this: ssh -2 -f  myaccount at remoteserver 3333:remoteserver:143 sleep 600 
, and then redirect my local IMAP client to port 3333 on my on own 
machine. I'm curious as to what happens to the packets after sshd on the 
remote server gets them. Would they be decrypted and treated like any 
other packet arriving on the interface, going through all of the 
iptables rules and such?
Thanks for the help.