We ran a number of tests to see which mail program would best fit the needs of Dimian Systems. These tests included: sending simple mail messages, mail with binary attachments, creation and use of aliases, saving messages to folders and changing folders and forwarding and replying to incoming mail. These tasks were chosen as being routine in the business environment, and appropriate in our research domain.
This task had two components:
This task involved sending an unencoded binary file, for the test we used a small 15k gif file. It was sent to a single user, and the recipient used all of the mail programs to decode the file. It was then viewed to ensure that it had been sent without being corrupted.
The first step was the creation of an alias, or distribution list. This list was composed of 10 different users, both local and remote. A mail message was then sent to the group, containing a request for a reply. This allowed us to see if our messages were making it to every member of the group.
An incoming message was saved from the Inbox folder, into a folder determined by the content. Three different messages were sent, two on the same topic, and one on it own topic. The two with the same topic were saved to the same file, where they should be appended. The odd file was saved to its own unique file. The mailer was then used to move between folders, and the messages were examined to ensure that they had not been corrupted, and had indeed been saved.
An incoming message was first forwarded to a different address, and a reply was then sent to the sender, informing them that their mail had been forwarded. We then checked with both of those addresses to ensure that the messages were delivered.