Raw emails needed for testing

Question

I'm playing around with a new C# email library and would like to test it as much as possible. I've used several POP3 email servers (e.g. Exchange, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.) to test support for the most popular email MIME formats e.g. text/plain, multipart/alternative, etc.

Does anyone know if there is a repository of sample emails that I can use to further test more obscure MIME formats e.g. application/pkcs7 etc.

This is to make sure the library is robust enough to handle these types of emails. Thanks.

Answer 1

When I was doing something similar a few years ago I found tons of source material to run through the parser in archived email list messages by searching for header keywords like X-Mailer and Return-Path. Email list postings are often aggregated by month and year so if you require the url to have e.g. Aug, Sep, Oct etc you can find very large files.

Example search "Return-Path" "X-Mailer" filetype:txt inurl:list

If you know which obscure content types you'd like to find just add them to the search and see what comes up.

e.g. "Return-Path" filetype:txt inurl:list pkcs7