I need to verify that a server that I have is sending out an email to every one in it’s database which is 100,000 people. I have a test lab set up with 5 email servers and my production machine. I have created aliases on the email servers for fake addresses that match up with my data. The problem I am running in to is that the production machine is sending the emails out 100-130 messages at a time and the sendmail logs on the receiving machines are not counting all of the emails so the total receaved emails on my 5 test email server do not add up to what has been sent. Does any one have an idea on how to verify that all of the emails are getting sent or receaved?

It's odd that sendmail isn't logging everything that is being sent. On my system if the load average gets too high it just stops sending mail (and logs that fact) until the load average drops.

It might pay to separate the actual monitoring from sendmail by capturing the packets with a sniffer and then parsing them via scripts to summarise what happened. The packet captures will be huge based on the numbers you're talking about so server load will be a factor.

Do you have any ideas for packet sniffers?

-AG

I use ethereal - you can output the data into several formats. The docs are a bit complicated since it's a powerful tool, but it's worth checking out. The tethereal utility that comes with it is for capturing and printing to stdout or a file. The ethereal utility is a gui to see things as they happen.

There's more to it than that, but my usage of it is at a basic level. For example, set some filters (port, host, protocol), capture data and dump it to disk. You can download it from http://www.ethereal.com/.