postal(8)

NAME
postal - program to test SMTP mail server throughput.

SYNOPSIS
postal [-m maximum-message-size] [-p processes] [-c messages-per-connection] [-r messages-per-minute] [-s ssl-percentage] [-l local-address] [-a] [-b [no]netscape] [-[z|Z] debug-file] smtp-server user-list-filename conversion-filename

DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents briefly the postal, program.

It is designed to test the performance of SMTP email servers by sending random messages to the specified server as fast as possible. A future version will support rate limiting to provide a constant load (for testing POP or IMAP).

The smtp-server parameter specifies the IP address or name of the mail server that the mail is to be sent to. Mail sent by Postal will not use MX records, this is to allow testing outbound relays etc. If you want to specify a port other than port 25 then enclose the host address in square brackets and have the port address immidiately following. If you want a DNS lookup for every connection (for testing round-robin DNS) then immediately preceed the host address with a '+' character. To specify multiple servers for round-robin use then seperate the addresses with commas.

The user-list-filename is the name of a file which contains a list of user's email addresses. This can be just user-names or fully qualified email addresses. Whatever you specify will be sent exactly in the SMTP protocol so make sure you do whatever is appropriate. If unsure then use fully qualified addresses (IE user@domain). If a conversion-filename is specified then the names in this file will be taken as a template and expanded to make the real names.

The conversion-filename parameter will either be "-" (for no conversions) or the name of a file containing the conversions to apply to email addresses. Each line in the file can either be a comment (starting with "#") or is to contain two parameters. The first parameter is the regular expression. For each email that is to be sent a randomly selected user-name will be checked against all regular expressions, the first match will determine the translation that is to be applied. The translation will be the second parameter on the line. It will contain a number of "." characters specifying characters in the name that are not to be translated. To specify the translations a range of characters can be specified inside square brackets. For example to have every address starting with "a" have a character from "01234567890abc" as it's second character and a character from "xyz" as it's third character you would have the following: ^a .[0-9abc][xyz]

The maximum-message-size indicates the size in Kilobytes that will be the maximum size of the message body. The size of each message body will be a random number between 0 and the maximum size. Specify "0" if you want just headers to test the connection rate. The default value is 10.

The processes parameter is the number of processes that should be forked off to attempt seperate connections. A well configured mail server won't accept an unlimited number of connections so make sure you don't specify a number larger than the number your mail server is configured to handle. Also for sensible results make sure that you don't use enough to make your server thrash as the results won't be representative of real-world use. The default value is 1, this default is not suitable for real tests, it's just for testing your configuration. If you specify multiple server addresses for round-robin use then this number of processes will be created per server, IE 4 servers and -p5 will give 20 processes total.

The messages-per-connection parameter is for sending more than one message per SMTP connection. The default value is "1". A value of -1 means to send an indefinate number of messages on one connection (~4 billion). If a value > 1 is specified then the number sent on each connection is a random number between 1 and the number specified. For simulating a mail server connected directly to the net use a value of 2 or 3. For simulating a mail server connected to a front-end relay use a large number. For testing for bugs in your mail server use the value 0 and leave it running for a week. ;) A value of 0 means to disconnect without sending any messages. Good for testing a LocalDirector.

The max-messages-per-minute parameter is for limiting the throughput of the program. This is designed to be used when you want to test the performance of other programs when the system is under load. The default is effectively 24000 messages per minute.

The local-address parameter specifies which local IP address(es) are used to make the outbound connections. Specified in the same way as the remote address. This is good for testing LocalDirectors or other devices that perform differently depending on which source IP address was used.

The -a command turns on all logging. All message data received will be logged. This will make it slow and it may not be able to saturate a fast Ethernet link...

The -b switch allows you to specify breakage strings. Currently the only option is for Netscape mail server which strips spaces from the start of subject lines. -b netscape means to avoid leading spaces on subject fields to not break Netscape. -b nonetscape means to always put extra space to test for the bug in Netscape and similar products. Some people say that the RFCs are open to interpretation on this issue, I am interested to see whether anyone else interprets it the way that Netscape does.

The -s switch specifies the percentage of connections which are to use TLS AKA SSL. Use 0 for no SSL, or 100 for always SSL, or any number in between. Default is 0.

The -z switch allows you to specify a debugging file base. From this base one file is created for each thread (with a ':' and the thread number appended), each file is used to log all IO performed by that thread for debugging purposes.

The -Z switch is the same but creates a separate file for each connection as well with an attitional ':' appended followed by the connection number.

RETURN CODES

0   No Error

1   Bad Parameters

2   System Error, lack of memory or some other resource

AUTHOR
This program, it's manual page, and the Debian package were written by Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au>.

SEE ALSO
postal-list(8),rabid(8),regex(7)