[H-GEN] Software for sending bulk-email (need to throughput-test anti-spam filter)

[Christopher Biggs]

Stuart Longland <stuartl at longlandclan.hopto.org> moved upon the face of the 'Net and spake thusly:

> Christopher Biggs wrote:
>
>> Basically, I want to be a spammer.  Unfortunately, spammers tend not
>> to post their engines on freshmeat.
>> Anyone got any suggestions?
>
> You could start emailing the spammers -- and perhaps subscribing to
> some pornography sites -- that usually sends the incomming email count
> through the roof.

Heh, I post to usenet with an un-munged address.  I already get /enough/ spam.

I did write a perl script, using libnet's Net::SMTP module.   Naive
approaches tend to be limited by the TCP handshake delay, and the TCP
round-trip delay imposed by non-pipelined SMTP.   Multiple perl
widget, running in multiple processes, can deliver around 100msg/s
(real messages of around 10k each) from one mid-spec desktop machine.

The 'smtp-source' utility shipped with the 'postfix' source code is
the fastest tool I've come across so far.  With this, we've been able
to deilver around 200msg/s per client system.

> The other option (and perhaps a safer one), would be to use a perl
> script to pluck a random message out of a directory, 

This is what I've done, and what some other tools do, except they
deliver via SMTP...

> then feed it to
> Sendmail.  Doing this from an outside host, whilst running multiple
> instances of the script in parallel, wouldn't be unlike some
> spammers.

Consigning messages to an MTA and allowing it to deliver them at its
own speed complicates profiling of delivery rate, otherwise your
approach is sound.    (in most cases that wouldn't matter, but my goal
here is to benchmark MTA throughput).

Regards,
        Chris.