Some years ago I wrote a tool called mailcat, which is a fake SMTP server that prints the incoming emails to stdout. I use it to this day when I need it in development. It's available at https://github.com/soveran/mailcat
Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service
71–80 of 91 posts
Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service
#72pogo77, congrats on launching. somewhat random comment: your site is completely broken when JS is disabled. This is usually not a problem for general Internet population, but somewhat important for your target audience who's got fed up with laggy JS animations and battery drain and installed NoJS with aggressive settings.
It's even broken with enabled JavaScript, but disabled Cookies. Sadly lots of sites are nowadays.
Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service
#73Shameless plug
Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service
#74I think some are being a smidgen too hard and dismissive about this.
That you can do this a bunch of other ways isn't really the point at all. Doesn't even matter if it's easy to do.
The point is to make it very easy to do and to provide some additional features in the process.
I am all for "another way to do it" and especially if the goals are making it easier while adding functionality and it doesn't cost me anything.
That's a "win win win" even if you never use it.
Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service
#75On 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.
I recently ported a small combined SMTP/POP3-server (from Ruby to Crystal) so I can read the mail from my projects in Thunderbird or the OS X Mail app. Yes, this is another shameless plug, but I hope it's useful: https://github.com/tijn/devmail
Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service
#76In a Java environment, we spin up an instance of Dumbster [0] using our test harnesses, run our integration tests and tear it back down.
Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service
#77This seems similar to https://mailtrap.io
I've used mailtrap with great success on a Django application that I used to work on. It really is great to just change the SMTP config for the mail sending service without having to worry about adding checks for "if in testing send all emails to a particular address".
Would this service have any benefits over what mailtrap offers?
Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service
#78"No fake recipient email addresses anymore, use real ones!" This is a really bad idea. Keep PII far away from your test environments.
Agreed. Don't use real PII for test environments. If you absolutely need to, find a way to create several hundred real functioning email addresses which are dedicated to testing purposes at different domains/services, as widely spread out as you can, to verify that your outgoing email is actually being delivered from a test environment.
You need to be able to verify, by looking at the receive headers on the individual email accounts, from a widely disparate set of receiving SMTP daemons/services that your emails are passing SPF, DKIM, DMARC checks, your IP block is not in some peoples' RBLs, etc.
Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service
#79Locally you can run papercut https://papercut.codeplex.com/
Re: Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service
#80"No fake recipient email addresses anymore, use real ones!" This is a really bad idea. Keep PII far away from your test environments.
Agreed. Don't use real PII for test environments. If you absolutely need to, find a way to create several hundred real functioning email addresses which are dedicated to testing purposes at different domains/services, as widely spread out as you can, to verify that your outgoing email is actually being delivered from a test environment. You need to be able to verify, by looking at the receive headers on the individua…
This is why I love Google's feature of letting you generate addresses with a +. It's so very useful