Good way to test email functionality

Question

Working on an app with notification via e-mail. I'd like to run test with out sending e-mails to production servers and clients. A couple years ago I remember someone bringing down our exchange server with a bad e-mail loop and would prefer to not repeat...

Any suggestion for a dev setup? Currently think a simple SMTP server will do the job but I'm not familiar with that space. I would need the ability to see all the emails sent to the server but they should never be delivered.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Papercut is the perfect fit for what you are looking for. It has been publicly available for the last couple of months. I have been using it for a month. It couldn't get any easier to test email functionality.

1. Download Papercut.
2. Run Papercut, while running it sits in your tray.
3. Configure your application's smtp host to the machine running Papercut.
4. Watch Papercut receive the emails and view the contents.
5. When you are done. Close Papercut.

Answer 2

It's pretty simple to set up an alias that is delivered to a file instead of through any delivery mechanism in any of the major Unix/Linux mail servers like Postfix or Sendmail. During the testing, you can tail that file to see that the mail is getting send when you expect it to. After your testing is over, you can re-direct it to where-ever it's really supposed to go.