Normally the SASL negotiation is performed on the terminal, with reading from stdin and writing to stdout. It is also possible to perform the negotiation with a server over a TCP network connection.
--connect=HOSTNAME[:SERVICE] Connect to TCP server and negotiate on stream instead of stdin/stdout. SERVICE is the protocol service, or an integer denoting the port, and defaults to 143 (imap) if not specified. Also sets the --hostname default.