Postal For Linux

Postal suite currently consists of two programs, Postal and Rabid. Postal (the mad postman) is a program that will deliver mail as fast as possible via the SMTP protocol to test mail server performance.

Rabid (the mad Biff) will eat mail via the POP protocol as fast as possible and measure POP server performance. All messages sent via Postal have MD5 checksums appended, and Rabid will check the MD5 to ensure that the messages are not being corrupted.

It works by taking a list of user names and applying random transformations to them to get the FROM and TO addresses, this is because if each email address takes 30 bytes of storage then 1,000,000 accounts would take 30M of RAM. 3,000,000 accounts would take 90M of RAM which would be more than the memory in my test machine (this would cause thrashing and make the benchmark invalid), and it would take ages to load all that data from the hard drive. Using 100,000 accounts and applying a transformation to map them to 30M accounts is a much more efficient use of resources.

When sending the mail the subject and body will be random data. A header field X-Postal will be used so that procmail can easily filter out such email just in case you accidentally put your own email address as one of the test addresses. ;)

For Debian the best thing to do is to do "apt-get install postal", if you don't want to use the version supplied with your version of Debian you can build a Debian package in the usual manner.

Change to the directory containing the unpacked source and use the command: dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -tc -us

That will create a .deb in the parent directory.

For Red Hat etc there is a portslave.spec file to allow for building with the "rpm -b" command.

For Solaris use the command "make -C sun" to build a package in /var/spool/pkg (make sure you have write access to that directory).

For other Unix setup "./configure ; make install" should do an install.

What's New in This Release:

� Minor changes were made to the documentation. � It is now possible to build without SSL support.