STAMP: SMTP Server Topological Analysis by Message Headers Parsing

Abstract

This paper presents STAMP: a tool to analyse SMTP servers overlay topology. STAMP builds a weighted and oriented graph from an email database, an email log or just a simple email header allowing a post-analysis of the SMTP overlay structure and the identification of the paths used by an email. The objective of this tool is twofold. STAMP allows to automatically perform an analysis of the SMTP topology for debugging (e.g, message delay, emails loop,...) and for metrology purposes. While several tracerou te-Iike measurements projects try to map the Internet, to the best of our knowledge, no tool allows to drive an analysis of the SMTP overlay network. Thus, the goal of the resulting graph is to develop methods (from graph theory, statistical analysis,...) to identify relaying problems. We aim to explore the impact of IP network problems over emails delivery (and respectively: emails' traffic over IP networks) in conjunction with IP measurements driven synchronously. In the present paper, we introduce the design and the measurement methodology of the STAMP software and as second contribution, bring out to the networking community the tool and some measurements databases.