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

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#51

Post by pm24601 » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:19 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…

* I would not use a free service - I want to know that my company is a customer. I want recourse/support if there a problem. That said - be sure to get insurance, for when there is a fck up.

* I want to pay to make sure that companies we use stay in business.

* If my business is using your services to make money - you should be able to ask for money easily.

* The "free forever" send the message that you are shy about asking for money.

* Start testing pricing now. (with the price "reduced" to "free" - ie use strikethrough)

* Remember a startup is only a business if it is charging for its services. Otherwise, it is just an expensive hobby.

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#52

Post by chrismeller » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:30 PM UTC

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.

The real issue there is that you're using PII in a test environment, not what address you send the test email to or what service it uses. Even if you were using a self-hosted mailtrap-like app you should be paranoid about PII ending up there (when was the last time someone did a security audit of that part of your infrastructure?).

There is value in being able to send test emails to a real email address, if for no other reason than you'd like to be able to test that the email address rewriter does turn off properly when you go from dev to QA.

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#53

Post by jkarneges » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:42 PM UTC

mrgreenfur wrote: post #33

Anyone seen something like this for webhooks? I want to quickly see the contents, headers and logs without building the middle-man myself.

http://webhookinbox.com/

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#54

Post by zackify » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:43 PM UTC

mailtrap.io?

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#55

Post by LinuxBender » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 5:10 PM UTC

Anyone using postfix already has smtp-sink in their arsenal. You already have a fake SMTP server.

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#56

Post by Manozco » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 5:34 PM UTC

richardwhiuk wrote: post #38

dlsym wrote: post #6

Please stop hijacking scrolling. Thankyou.

There's a really horrible dithering effect on Chrome on Windows 10 when you scroll which gives me a headache.

Also on Ubuntu 16.04

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#57

Post by haroldp » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 5:38 PM UTC

On my laptop, where I do all of my development work, I just configured Postfix to send everything to plain files:

http://harold.internal.org/configuring-a-dev-box-mail-server...

I like this a lot better than sending stuff out across the network.

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#58

Post by pogo77 » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 5:39 PM UTC

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.

You are right, we agree that it's better to not use real data and probably shoudn't have used it as one of the "features", but sometimes it's hard to anonymize data you already have or you just need to test some one-time script and check if all the emails are going to be send correctly etc. Anyways, we will probably change that text, thanks!

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#59

Post by kazinator » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 5:41 PM UTC

> No fake recipient email addresses anymore, use real ones!

What if you send to the wrong server by mistake; not to develmail.com? develmai.com won't save your butt then.

Say something breaks in your configuration, and some mail-related layer resolves the address directly to an MX host and sends it there instead of the SMTP forwarding host it is supposed to be using ... know what I mean?

If you don't want packets to go to the wrong place, isolate your test box physically: e.g. 192.168.0.x "lab" network with no gateway to the Internet your intranet.

Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service

#60

Post by pogo77 » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 5:46 PM UTC

Thanks for all the comments so far, we really didn't expect so many of them, even though most of them are suggesting alternatives (just kidding, we appreciate them as well :)

We are especially thankful for suggestions about what to change, improve or add, we will try to work on them and also probably change page design/theme to make it simpler and cleaner.

We know about most of the alternatives lot of you suggested (mailcatcher, maildev, etc...) and we used them a lot, but we created this so you can have it "installed" everywhere or maybe share account so other people from company could check emails, texts etc easily.

And we wanted to publish this MVP as soon as possible to check if there is at least some interest in such thing (and even our server couldn't handle it sometimes :)