This repository contains randomly generated emails according to our mrmime tool. Mr. MIME is a library to parse & encode an email. So we developped a tool to randomly generate an email and ensure a kind of isormophism such as:

$ x = generate (seed)
$ test x = decode (encode (x))

This corpus contains valid emails and Mr. MIME does not alterate them when it parses or encodes them. Our MUA should do the same! As the Enron's corpus, Hamlet wants to improve the email stack.

Due to the random generation, emails are not human-readable but still they are valids. An email client should be able to process it and transfer it - decode it / encode it - without alterations.

The goal of this corpus is an alternative to the Enron database without privacy concerns (because we generated these emails instead of collecting them). It permits us to test our email implementation and check its reliability with the standards (see RFC5322).

In our development process, this corpus is acts as an "oracle" to ensure some edge cases about the standards and a kind of "isomorphim".

This corpus was generated via our Mr. MIME tool with a specific seed. You can reproduce the generation:

$ git clone https://github.com/mirage/mrmime
$ cd mrmime
$ opam pin add -y .
$ dune exec corpus/generate.exe -- crowbar --multi 1000000 --seed 0

The equality we have defined between a generated email m and its and decoded counterpart m' is not strictly exact. What is actually check is:

• structural equality: both emails must have the same structure. For example, if m is a multipart email with 3 parts, m' is also a multipart mail with 3 parts, and the equality is recursivly called on each of the parts;

• partial header equality: the headers present are the same and in order but equality between the values is only checked for the headers for which values are completely parsed by mrmime (like Content-Type, Content-Transfer-Encoding or Date). Note a small exception for Content-type header: boundary parameter can change between m and m';

• content equality.

By this way, semantically, Mr. MIME does not alterate any important part of your email and what you parsed is what you can read.

The corpus is under the CC0 license.

hamlet has received funding from the Next Generation Internet Initiative (NGI) within the framework of the DAPSI Project.