MailScanner load testing advice

[Pete]

Julian Field wrote:

> 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.
>
Thanks so much for your input - I suppose i have a months worth of spam
i could repeatedly send at the new server, as we store all spam for 30 days.
 From a copy of the quarantine directory, what would you do to send all
the mail? does any one know if something like a perl script could scour
the dirs and send it? re addressing it as it goes, so its all aimed at
the one address as you describe? Or even just mailling it all again - i
can make the mailscanner machine send all outbound mail to the machine
running smtpsinkd ?

Or is your 'SMTP' mail generator available for use by the public (me?)?

I have the machines to do all this, but not the skills to write all the
tools - maybe i could point 3 or more machines at my scanner all pumping
it with spam - see if we can find a stress point - i would really like
to know what the max this machine will handle - appreciate any further
help i can get.

thanks again Julian
Pete