Mailtrap is an email testing and delivery service whose blog covers email deliverability, SMTP, DMARC, and email development.
Commenters repeatedly recommend Mailtrap as a fake SMTP service for development and staging. They like that non-developers can review the captured emails.
With the advent of easy to use docker containers, this is really easy to do for most backing services, right on your machine during tests (and in CI).
If all your app needs is rabbitmq (or some queue), redis, and postgres you can run all of them in the background and give out databases/exchanges to your app as you see fit. This also does something interesting -- it turns you away from tools that don't do badly in containerized environments or who are hard to set up, which is a benefit in my mind. It also turns you away from proprietary cloud solutions that you can't run yourself (which isn't always possible but meh).
I trust my E2E tests a lot more when they're not built on mocking. I'm almost tempted to say that mocking is pointless in this world -- just test the real thing.
[EDIT] Since most people will know how to run redis/postgres/rabbitmq easily, one of the high value things is smtp testing. Here are a few projectsfor that:
- https://github.com/sj26/mailcatcher (https://mailcatcher.me)
- https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog
- https://github.com/maildev/maildev (http://maildev.github.io/maildev/)
- https://github.com/remko/smtp-http-proxy (this is more for turning SMTP into HTTP but it's cool)
- https://github.com/flashmob/go-guerrilla
Remember, for a lot of these projects don't be worried if you don't see updates for years -- once you've written a reasonably working SMTP server, it may not need to change much.
I might take one of these and try to build a…
Multiple sources and over 10 years of email server shenanigans. IP reputation partially due to low mail volume is a very well known issue for mail servers and DMARC and DKIM are definitely not enough. Here is one article that covers it that I quickly pulled up: https://mailtrap.io/blog/email-ip-reputation/
Mail deliver-ability has been discussed multiple times here on hackernews with the poor state of the postmaster tools being explicitly mentioned in the articles. For example Google is eating our mail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19756125
> Most of the Postmaster Tools dashboards will only display data when there’s a sizable daily volume of email traffic (up to the order of hundreds) coming from your Authentication Domains and/or certain other conditions, in place to prevent abuse.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9983020?hl=en_#zippy=%2Cwhy-are-some-or-all-of-my-dashboards-empty-why-do-i-not-see-any-data
Postmaster tool links for additional FAQ's:
https://www.gmail.com/postmaster/
https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/pm/
Does anyone know of a similar tool for catching SMS messages in local/development environment? My company uses mailtrap[0] in our development environments to give engineers and product managers a tool to preview emails that would otherwise be sent to users and we're looking for a similar tool for the SMS messages that we send via Twilio. I'd love to have a shared "inbox" per-development environment where PMs can see all the SMS messages that would have been sent (namely to whom the message was sent + the content of the SMS). Ideally it'd hook into whatever Twilio SDK your app is using to send messages (Python, in our case) to intercept calls and route them to the sandbox instead.
It seems like Twilio played with this idea with the Twilio Dev Phone project[1] but that project doesn't seem to be actively maintained.
[0] https://mailtrap.io [1] https://github.com/twilio-labs/dev-phone
ActionMailer extension works as a balancer that allows safely migrating to a new email provider, proportionally distributing the email sending load between two different sending services and keeping the sending equilibrium. For example, you set up 70% with SendGrid, and 30% with Mailtrap (or any other provider).
You can check out the article for detailed info: https://mailtrap.io/blog/actionmailer-balancer/
For shared non-production environments, I’ve always been a big fan of Mailtrap.io in this space.
Same idea of faking delivery but puts it in a location where non-devs can access and review it.
https://mailtrap.io/
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/