[PLUG] Are there any spam simulators out there?

[Keith Lofstrom]

> On Sun, Oct 12, 2003 at 10:54:26PM -0700, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> > I'm fiddling with spam filtering right now, and watching mail
> > files as they filter through procmail and such.  However, the
> > spam isn't reliable (!!);  though I get an average of 200 to
> > 400 per day, they can be as much as 10 minutes apart.  Is there
> > any way to simulate spam?  Say a website out there that can
> > be instructed to send random simulated spams in a burst?
                                                                                
Paul Johnson replied:
> Do you keep archives of your mail?  If so, just go back through, find
> at least 200 spam and 200 ham, and start learnin!

You are right, this might be easier than finding some outside source
of spam/ham.  I have plenty of saved ham and spam, which I used when
I trained bogofilter.  I just don't know how to transform mbox text
into a stream of handshaked stuff that I can blow into SMTP port 25
on my firewall like it was coming from the net.  For the current job,
I could even launch the stuff inside the firewall at the mail server, 
but I would like to include the firewall in the tests.

So now the question is, are there any test tools that can turn a
mbox file (or a Maildir directory) into messages feeding port 25?

This isn't about training the tools, it is about seeing that all the
tools are working together correctly and that they respond correctly
to a burst of messages.  For this I need test generators.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom           keithl at ieee.org         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs