Testing The Event Notification System

With the release of version 4.356.0 of GreenArrow Engine, we now include the ability to simulate certain delivery outcomes to allow you to test your ability to handle event notifications for these outcomes prior to going live. These simulations are done by sending mail to internal addresses or addresses managed by GreenArrow, and thus you can send as many simulated messages as you need with no worries about endangering your domain’s reputation.

The delivery outcomes we support simulation for are:

• Synchronous bounces, where the message is rejected by the receiving domain during the SMTP transaction;
• Asynchronous bounces, where the message is first accepted by the receiving domain and then returned to the sender, specifically the bounce address for that message (i.e., the address in the message’s Return-Path header field);
• Delivery after deferral, where the message is initially deferred by the receiving domain and then accepted during a later delivery attempt;
• Expiration from queue, where the message is queued for periodic retry after failing on its first attempt, and then continually fails to deliver until the time allotted for its time in queue expires.

Configuration

In order to make use of this feature, you’ll first need to add some directives to your greenarrow.conf file.

Edit the file /var/hvmail/control/greenarrow.conf and add the following stanzas to the end of the file:

ip_address * {
  domain event-simulator.local {
    smtp_route 127.0.0.1:226
    retry_time 5s
  }
  domain failure-toolong.event-simulator.local {
    delivery_override temp_failure
    queue_lifetime 8s
    retry_time 5s
  }
}

Save the file, and then run the command greenarrow_config reload. Assuming no errors, you’re now ready to send test emails to simulate the delivery events.

Simulation Addresses

Once you’ve updated the configuration for GreenArrow Engine, you’re now ready to inject messages that will produce the simulated events. These are the addresses (note that anyString in any of the listed addresses means any random string of printable characters you wish to use for your testing purposes):

Inject messages into your GreenArrow Engine using SimpleMH, the HTTP Submission API, or even GreenArrow Studio with these addresses as the destinations for them, and you’ll generate the necessary events to let you move forward with testing your event notification handling processes.