Saturday, November 3, 2007

swaks for SMTP testing

I find the best way to test mail servers is to telnet to the port and send a message manually. I can connect to the mail server I want and add time stamps to subjects and other identifiers and headers. It can be time consuming, so sometimes I'll create a text file I can copy and paste with all my commands.

About a year ago I found swaks by John Jetmore (never met him and have no idea who he is). It's a really handy script, because:

  • you can tell it what server to connect to, headers to add, who to send the message to and who it is from
  • it dumps the output from the mail server to stdout
  • the commands are in your bash history, so no copying and pasting

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