In a previous blog entry, I talked about an idea for an SMTP shell. A colleague at work suggested I take a look at swaks (Swiss Army Knife SMTP). swaks looks really useful. I wonder how easily it could be extended to have a shell mode...

We've got a bunch of Perl-based tools at work for testing our SMTP server that use Net::Telnet that do plain SMTP. These use instances of stunnel to wrap the plain, unencrypted SMTP conversations in different types of TLS connections (e.g.: with client certs, without, etc.). The test tool does what it's good at (weird SMTP test cases), while stunnel does what it's good at (TLS). That could be better -- why not integrate TLS support into the test tool? At the time it saved me a lot of time, leaving me to concentrate on writing test cases. Maybe it's time to borrow code from swaks, to integrate TLS directly into our test harness.