
Ethereal Email – A fake SMTP service - andris9
https://ethereal.email/
======
justboxing
Not trolling, but why would any developer need a service like this? Isn't that
what Mocking frameworks and Interfaces (Interface driven design) are for?

Ex: I would create an interface called IMailService with the operations like
Send etc, and once my application is ready, just swap the concrete
implementation of the MailService class with the one that talks to the real
mail service using Dependency Injection.

If it's not for developers, who would use something like this?

~~~
itake
We use mailcatcher[0] on our sandbox server so that product and QA can test
email features in a live environment. Mailcatcher was a drop in replacement
with our existing codebase. No need to add in additional business logic
specific for testing or have to write our own interface to expose the "sent"
emails.

[0] [https://mailcatcher.me/](https://mailcatcher.me/)

~~~
brightball
Yep. Mailhog is another good one.

For staging environments I like Mailtrap.io because it's a cleaner interface
for non-devs.

~~~
itake
You get what you pay for :). mailcatcher is OSS and self hosted. Mailhog
definitely looks prettier.

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0x0
If you are using /usr/sbin/sendmail style delivery, for example via the built-
in postfix implementation on macOS and many linux-like systems, it's fairly
easy to configure postfix to rewrite absolutely everything to go to your own
email address. This can be quite helpful during development, because not only
do you get to see the emails as they are delivered, but you can also worry
less about sending development emails out to random addresses around the
world. (Look into "recipient_canonical_maps")

~~~
rocqua
You need the destination address to not run dkim spf or dmarc on the forwarded
emails with rewritten destinations.

I came across this when forwarding everything to gmail. Gmail is smart enough
to accept this for mail originally destined for an address you enabled as
"send from". However, mail sent to e.g. retailName@domain.com will fail the
checks and never be delivered.

~~~
andris9
Gmail is great for an occasional test email but it starts rate limiting pretty
fast when trying to send many messages to a single account.

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AceyMan
My team uses mailcatcher, also, but (partly) for reasons I've not yet seen
mentioned:

Our primary application allows us to safely import recent dumps of the
production databases into select CI systems, of which some tables have user
records with real email addresses for report sending, etc.

In the case that the code which sanitizes these records misfires or otherwise
fails to do its job, at least we won't send random emails to actual customers.
I know we've all gotten those from a vendor at one time or another and it's a
corporate level face-palm that's worth the extra effort to avoid. Belts &
suspenders, defense-in-depth, and all that.

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jordanab
We always use MailTrap for our projects. It's a fake SMTP server with a
webbased inbox. Nothing to install, you just have to configure some SMTP
credentials in your applications. [https://mailtrap.io/](https://mailtrap.io/)

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Operyl
If the developer is reading: you probably shouldn’t tell your users to click
banner ads, if I recall correctly that’s grounds for termination:

“8. How is this sustainable Ethereal Email service is funded by the ads
displayed on Nodemailer.com. So don't forget to click on these banners!”

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Moto7451
Funny. Just today I needed a locally hosted version of this and came across:
[https://mailcatcher.me](https://mailcatcher.me)

So far my experience has been good. I get to work on some email sending code
on a wifi-less airplane.

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therealidiot
I recently learned of MailDev

[http://danfarrelly.nyc/MailDev/](http://danfarrelly.nyc/MailDev/)

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jwcrux
I also recommend MailHog[0]. I've had nothing but good experiences with it,
and it was dirt simple to install.

[0] [https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog](https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog)

~~~
brokenmachine
Dirt simple? You must be dead poor. :-P

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sebazzz
I like Papercut better. It runs on your own machine and you can configure
forwarding rules in case you want to test e-mail on other clients like Outlook
or GMail. The interface is simple and clean.

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squiggy22
Big fan of [https://mailtrap.io](https://mailtrap.io)

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Xeoncross
I want to know if there are any httperf/seige like tools for email. I would
love to blast my server with 100k valid & invalid emails and see how it does.

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misky8
There's also Mailinator - Web & API
[https://www.mailinator.com](https://www.mailinator.com)

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mrjd
Also [https://letterb.in](https://letterb.in) which also has an API if it's
handy to anyone.

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LinuxBender
How is this better than using smtp-sink that comes with postfix?

~~~
andris9
Ethereal allows to generate new testing accounts via an API. Every account is
a full featured IMAP/POP3 mail store with the condition that all emails expire
after 7 days from the account.

~~~
LinuxBender
Fair enough. I only ask because email testing should be able to run in an
isolated test network. Perhaps dovcot+postfix in a container may be too much
work for some folks.

