Before you think this is a thread about me wanting code for my project, don't worry, I'm not into having others do my work..

So get this, I'm in a software engineering course and our professor is not the brightest in the world... or at least in my opinion. Our webmail services were having difficulties over this past summer with mail not being delivered or if it was, it was malformed or delivered extremely late. This is what we have to do by the end of the semester:

Write a cross platform app (not java, but I think perl, maybe c++) that for both a client and a server to measure the performance of our mail system.. But this is how he wants it to work:

Sit in the background and when the person clicks "Send" IN webmail (Not a POP client...) he wants it to pick up all the info from the emails header and then have the server sitting on the UNIX box that will compare the header info and checksum from the client...

The only thing is that I have no clue how to actually code something like this and NO ONE else does in our class either... including the professor. I was thinking the only way was to have some sort of packet sniffer grab the email, deconstruct it and read the header and have the same on the server... then use our app to benchmark the times.

So, yeah, any thoughts on how we could accomplish this?

-aqua

The only way I can see this working is to md5sum the fields that you submit in the webmail interface, do the same on the server side with the webmail application and compare them.

The problems I see with this:
1) You can't really check the headers on the client and the server since they will only be generated in full on the webserver itself.
2) I would doubt if the problem you are experiencing is between the browser and webserver.
3) Your time would probably be much better spent working out where the slow/broken point is and fixing that.

yea, thats a tough one. without hacking the source for the webmail, i'm not sure how you could tell when the OK button has been pushed.

otherwise, it seems like your going to have to have something listen for the OK button pressed event, and that would have to occure in the code for the webmail user interface.

I agree, I think this project is way to ambitious for us to take on... considering I think I'm one of two people in my group with any knowledge of network programming.

wish i could be of more help

I think you'd have to interrogate the mailserver (eg sendmail, qmail) queues at each end... awkward.
Frankly, just knowing when you sent the msg and when it arrived you can do by hand (for a small num of msgs), but it won't tell you why it takes so long.
You'd have to do serious logging at each stage/machine on the path to find the problem, although if each mail system adds extra hdrs with eg GMT timestamps, that may do it.
To test the network, just write your own tcp client/server combo on any port eg 8000.