Postal Suite

Postal Suite is made up of two cool programs: Postal and Rabid. Postal, also known as the mad postman, is all about sending emails super fast using the SMTP protocol. It’s great for testing how well your mail server performs.

Meet Rabid

Then there’s Rabid, or the mad Biff, who focuses on receiving emails through the POP protocol. It quickly gobbles up mail to measure how well a POP server works. Every message that Postal sends gets an MD5 checksum added to it, and Rabid checks that checksum to make sure nothing goes wrong with the messages.

Email Address Magic

So how does it work? Well, it starts with a list of usernames and does some fun random transformations to create FROM and TO addresses. This trick helps save space! For example, if each email address takes 30 bytes, storing 1 million accounts would need 30MB of RAM. But if we use 100,000 accounts and transform them into 30 million addresses? That’s way better for memory usage!

Sending Mail Made Easy

When it comes to sending out emails, both the subject and body are filled with random data. Plus, there’s a special header called X-Postal so that procmail can easily filter those test emails—just in case you accidentally include your own email in the mix!

Installing Postal on Different Systems

If you're using Debian, you can get started by running apt-get install postal. If you’d rather use another version than what comes with Debian, you can build your own package pretty easily.

Just switch over to the directory where your unpacked source is located and use this command:
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -tc -us

This will create a .deb file in the parent directory.

Building for Other Systems

If you're on Red Hat or similar systems, there’s a portsave.spec file available for building with rpm -b. On Solaris? Just run make -C sun, but make sure you have permission to write in /var/spool/pkg.

If you’re working on other Unix systems, just run .\/configure ; make install.

What’s New in This Release:

• A few minor updates were made to the documentation.


• You can now build without SSL support if needed.