Global-scale Anti-spam Testing in Your Own Back Yard.
Margaret Nielsen, Dane Bertram, Sampson Pun, John Aycock, Nathan Friess · 2008
A class of anti-spam techniques requires large-scale, sometimes globally distributed networks of computers in order to operate successfully. Testing the effectiveness of these types of anti-spam systems – being able to run large controlled experiments – has not been well-explored in previous work on antispam testing. To address this problem, we describe a system we have constructed to test global antispam techniques that is built on top of the Spamulator, a system that simulates relevant parts of the Internet on a single computer. We demonstrate the viability of our testing system by deploying over 10,000 SMTP servers, and using them to perform proof-ofconcept experiments on SMTP tarpits and a variation on the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse. 1