Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#41

Post by cat199 » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:02 PM UTC

tajen wrote: post #29

Why not one-liners? Available on every Linux and Mac: python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025 Oh and serve a directory as a website with this other one-liner: python -m SimpleHTTPServer

you sir, just shut this whole thread down, methinks.

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#42

Post by sethammons » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:04 PM UTC

    As a startup we currently offer one simple subscription program completely for FREE! 
    Meanwhile, we are working hard on our paid plans with plenty of new features, everyone who signs up for our current free plan will be automatically migrated to our highest paid plan for free forever!
    **In case of excessive or unreasonable use of service, additional limits may be applied

As a developer, I appreciate being able to lightly use a service for free. I also appreciate that people have to be paid. It's ok to charge for something that gives value to other people. I think that promising early users to be free forever is short sighted. Maybe they have to offer it for free because it is relatively easy to just spin up your own SMTP sink locally.

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#43

Post by always_good » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:12 PM UTC

sethammons wrote: post #42

As a startup we currently offer one simple subscription program completely for FREE! Meanwhile, we are working hard on our paid plans with plenty of new features, everyone who signs up for our current free plan will be automatically migrated to our highest paid plan for free forever! **In case of excessive or unreasonable use of service, additional limits may be applied As a developer, I appreciate being able to ligh…

Also, I think of all the services I've used that (usually quietly) limit their "free forever" service into a tier and scrub it from their marketing once they get rolling and don't need to over-promise in their marketing anymore.

I'm sure it converts better, but it feels more honest to remove the "forever" part.

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#44

Post by vmp » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:33 PM UTC

I made my own little debugging SMTP server in C# some time ago: https://github.com/vmp32k/MailBug/releases

It's not pretty but it works well enough. :)

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#45

Post by diamondo25 » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:42 PM UTC

At my previous company we used mailcatcher[1]. Worked fine, but with lots of e-mails, the service might crash.

[1] https://mailcatcher.me/

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#46

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:00 PM UTC

gnud wrote: post #22

cotillion wrote: post #10

"No fake recipient email addresses anymore, use real ones!" This is a really bad idea. Keep PII far away from your test environments.

I completely agree - but I use mailtrap.io quite a lot. It's wonderful to be able to make up any email address and have mail sent to it from your test system, without having to run your own mail infrastructure.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#47

Post by masklinn » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:02 PM UTC

lagadu wrote: post #36

recursive wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMTP4dev is a good option for Windows.

Personally I use Papercut and so far I'm pretty happy.

If you don't need the complexity of a full-blown visualisation UI, you can just (assuming you have Python on the machine) run

     python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025

it will dump all mail to stdout.

(change port as you see fit, below 1024 requires root/sudoing)

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#48

Post by Vendan » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

c0wb0yc0d3r wrote: post #24

r1ch wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One very useful feature would be to add up to date filtering systems in report only mode (eg SpamAssassin), SPF / DKIM / DMARC checks, etc. Without having your own up to date inbound MTA, it's very difficult to test your own mails for things that might be triggering spam filters.

Do those services really have a feature like that? That seems like they wouldn't people to easily figure out if an email the have sent makes it through filters. Maybe I'm wrong, I have never had to worry about email in a business environment.

SpamAssassin, DKIM, SPF, DMARC are all things that you can check locally, so yeah, you can def. determine if an email is going to get through at least basic filters. Note that SpamAssassin is more a framework, and that a lot of this stuff is going to be bayesian/machine learning kinda stuff, so while you may get through basic level filters, people pay a lot for the higher end stuff, and you can't test those kinds of things. (barracuda email filtering and that kind of thing)

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#49

Post by welder » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:08 PM UTC

Sounds like inbox.py: https://github.com/kennethreitz/inbox.py

This is the simplest SMTP server you'll ever see. It's asynchronous. One instance should handle over one thousand emails per second.

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#50

Post by pmontra » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:16 PM UTC

amnah wrote: post #26

tony101 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Wouldn't this be a good way to harvest a ton of valid email addresses?

This was my first thought. I definitely wouldn't risk my client's privacy going through a third party like this.

I usually seed dev and test databases with fake data. Emails are usually a sequence like userN@example.com Sending mail to that is usually not a problem, unless the content of the mail is somewhat sensitive. Again, fake data helps. When I work with Ruby I use the faker gem.

If you have to import production data then, yes, that would be annoying. Anonimizing data sometimes is not easy.