On Wednesday 15 November 2006 13:30, MrKiwi wrote:

Hi All,

My kit : Centos4.4 + Postfix + SA + ClamAV (not that its relevant)

General question - Does anyone know of a product which can take a folder / mbox of mail (spam, ham, virus infected stuff, scam mail and hoaxes) and "replay" it back against a test server to determine the servers ability to filter?

I have looked at some low level (IP) packet replayers, but i cant really find anything suitable at the mail/smtp level. It would have to "simulate" connections from external IP addresses to allow RBL etc to work and also i guess i would have to choose an "MTA style" of the sender to be simulated so that the MTA i am testing can do its thing when some tries something which fails the smtpd_*_restrictions tests.

It will probably be the case that i need to "recapture" the mail at a higher detail, as an RFC compliant unit of mail in my mailbox doesn't tell me anything about how the smtp conversation went, and certainly doesn't allow me to recreate the conversation.

Is anyone building something like this?

Any hints appreciated.

For general redelivery of a mail spool, fetchmail might do what you want.

Accurately redelivering messages to a server with the express purpose of testing it's filtering system with regard to the original delivery seems extremely hard. One problem is that the filtering systems today generally do quite a few live checks of remote resources to determine spam, which you have no way or guaranteeing are the same. The other is getting the SMTP daemon (postfix in your case) to treat the incoming messages as if they were coming from the correct remote location.

If there's something out there that does it though, I'd definitely be interested.