testing a mail server??

[TAG]

Hi,

I know many people have asked this in the past, but is there a simple
way of testing a mail server's concurency and hdd writes, etc - I was
thinking of doing running a small program that will check for mail, d/l
mail and pipe it to /dev/null - but how does a email cleint get mail and
can that be done via a command line - not using telnet!!???

Please help - I am eager to see the performance of a particular install
of qmail??

Thanks
Tonino