MailScanner load testing advice

[Julian Field]

At 02:42 01/04/2004, you wrote:
>My colleague has written a small PHP script that will send a bunch of
>messages to my mailscanner machine. I was going to try and see how many
>i can send it before it starts complaining (eg 1000s, 10000s 1000000s
>etc) since my mailscanner machine and other test machine are both on the
>same lan.
>
>I have used the details from this test - but i wonder how stressful it
>is on MailScanner recieving the same email over and over ? as long as it
>triggers spam ruiles then its providing some stress?
>http://hyvatti.iki.fi/~jaakko/spam/unkillable.txt

Ideally you want to send different mail, a real life sample of your mail
traffic is best. I keep a little archive of 500,000 recent messages for
doing this. I have blatted all the sender and recipient addresses to
"anonymous" in the envelope data so that it can't leak out. All the mail
servers on my site have "anonymous" aliased to "/dev/null" so every other
mail server here will throw it away (my test leaked out once and I learnt
the hard way!).

I then set up the MTA on the test server to send all the mail to a separate
named server which runs a little "smtpsinkd" script I wrote which
implements just enough SMTP to fool a mail server into thinking it is
talking to a real MTA. It throws away all data sent to it.

So the tests involve 3 machines:
1) SMTP mail generator
2) test server you are interested in
3) SMTP sink

If you want the smtpsinkd script, I have attached it to this message.


>BUT i need to set up the output to go nowhere - how do i send a legit
>email/spam, let it get scanned and placed back in the postfix incoming
>queue, but not delivered, just deleted? I am using the single postfix
>and freebsd. If there a way, if i specificied an alias pointed at
>dev/null in the aliases file and emailed alias at localhost ? What is the
>best way to do this?
>
>
>
>Thanks
>Pete
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Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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