How to get stunnel running on Ubuntu 12.04 precise
Summary: Download the source packages instead: stunnel-4.54.tar.gz and build them locally somewhere in a home directory, with:
./configure --prefix=/home/auser/where-you-want-stunnel
I'm writing this in frustration so I might go back here and do some edits later. Anyways: I tried to use the stunnel packages supplied with the Precise Pangolin distribution. Setting up two stunnel daemons between two machines with those, is like trying to play the violin with two cold, dead fish. They start, but they do not read any configuration files (sheet music in the case of the fish). Or they might, but I doubt it since writing garbage in the config files does not make the stunnel daemons react. In fact I think the 12.04 stunnel daemons are some of the most stable things on earth in their complete insensitivity to anything happening around them, like config files in the right place or having any kind of arguments with them. And by that I mean command line arguments.
In contrast, the source tarballs are all rainbows and unicorns, printing sane and helpful stuff to stdout and stderr, and I got up and running with them in 20 mins. Not gonna dwell how big a dollop of my life the the debs disappeared with.