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Show HN: Fake SMTP server as a service
- pogo77 10y agoWe created this for our usage, but decided it could be useful for other people too :) It's still under development, so there are not many features yet, but we would like to hear your opinions and what could we improve or add. Thanks!
- r1ch 10y agoOne 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.
- c0wb0yc0d3r 10y agoDo 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.
- Vendan 10y agoSpamAssassin, 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)
- helb 10y agoUh, maybe consider changing the styling/colors of that image slider at the top of your website: http://imgur.com/a/EY3sU http://imgur.com/a/EY3sU
- deftnerd 10y agoThanks for keeping it for free. I use mailtrap.io and haven't ever hit their limits, but having it as a free service to the community is appreciated.
- richardboegli 10y agoI missed the signup button as it was white and the image HD not loaded. I suggest adding another signup button at the bottom of the page. After I read the features I scrolled back up to look for a signup button which is when I noticed it was white as background image had loaded.
- dlsym 10y agoPlease stop hijacking scrolling. Thankyou.
- zulln 10y agoThat together with a link to https://develhell.com/ https://develhell.com/ at the bottom actually made me think it was a joke at first.
- Operyl 10y agoThe pug made me think that to be honest.
- Someone1234 10y agoI already have "Scroll Anchoring" enabled in Chrome's flags, wish they'd add a flag just to disable page's ability to override scrolling completely. Unfortunately "Scroll Anchoring" will likely never make it to a production build as it has odd interactions with sites that override scrolling to jump to new page elements (adverts in particular). CNN Edition pages are particularly broken: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/03/europe/st-petersburg-russia-metro-explosion-latest/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/03/europe/st-petersburg-russi...
- richardwhiuk 10y agoThere's a really horrible dithering effect on Chrome on Windows 10 when you scroll which gives me a headache.
- Manozco 10y agoAlso on Ubuntu 16.04
- pogo77 10y agoSorry, we didn't notice that. The design comes with this feature, but we will probably change it very soon.
- lloeki 10y agoThis seems similar to https://mailtrap.io https://mailtrap.io
- asadjb 10y agoI'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?
- cyberferret 10y agoAnd similar to http://mailinator.com http://mailinator.com
- yenoham 10y agoAlso https://mailosaur.com https://mailosaur.com Disclaimer co-founder
- beefhash 10y agoSo this is useful for: 1. developing software that sends e-mails, but not having to set up a test environment/pray you don't break production, and 2. testing out new software that insists on sending e-mail when you're just one person in a small/localhost-only environment. I love it. One thing I'm sad to see is that there seems to be no TLS/STARTTLS support on the side of develmail. Given that TLS can be a bit finicky to set up and that plaintext SMTP is ideally deprecated as fast as possible, it may be worth a thought to just Let's Encrypt it.
- pogo77 10y agoThanks! We understand that encryption is a must, we plan to add this feature as soon as possible.
- cotillion 10y ago"No fake recipient email addresses anymore, use real ones!" This is a really bad idea. Keep PII far away from your test environments.
- trimbo 10y agoPlus, all it takes is one bad setting to accidentally spam all of those people.
- tonyztan 10y agoExactly. Wouldn't this be a good way to harvest a ton of valid email addresses?
- amnah 10y agoThis was my first thought. I definitely wouldn't risk my client's privacy going through a third party like this.
- pmontra 10y agoI 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.
- gnud 10y agoI 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.
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- Damin0u 10y agoI don't like the idea of external SMTP for this when http://danfarrelly.nyc/MailDev/ http://danfarrelly.nyc/MailDev/ can make everything works locally - and it's very easy to add in our Docker based projects.
- weirdo1 10y agoYeah, there are a couple very good opensource options like this on github.
- recursive 10y agoSMTP4dev is a good option for Windows.
- lagadu 10y agoPersonally I use Papercut and so far I'm pretty happy.
- masklinn 10y agoIf 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)
- weirdo1 10y agoYou can just use MailHog for free, it works pretty good. https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog
- mcbetz 10y agoMailCatcher (Ruby, https://mailcatcher.me/ https://mailcatcher.me/) is a good and open solution for this, MailHog (Go) is open as well, even simpler to set up (no worries about Ruby versions) and has never caused me any trouble.
- brightball 10y agoI'm a fan of MailHog. It's simple for the whole team to setup and the optional chaos monkey button is a great way to make sure your email system can tolerate periodic failures properly. It works locally and is really simple to setup for shared staging/prerelease environments, handles high volumes really well and the websocket auto-update system is great. Personally, I'm a fan of using Mailhog for local and Mailtrap.io for shared environments because in my experience, non-technical testers have a better experience with Mailtrap and it's simple tie ins to review the look of emails on different platforms/clients. Basically, Mailhog for local sending, does it send, can it handle failure, etc and Mailtrap.io for "does it look right?".
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- throwasehasdwi 10y agoI've been using this for ages, works like a charm https://github.com/rnwood/smtp4dev https://github.com/rnwood/smtp4dev
- jlgaddis 10y agoIs this something people would actually pay for? Why not just set up a box running Postfix with a catch-all address and an outbound block on 25/TCP?
- lagadu 10y agoYou answered your own question: that is a lot more work than using either this or one of the purpose-made packages like papercut or smtp4dev.
- option_greek 10y agohonorary mention: https://10minutemail.com/ https://10minutemail.com/ :)
- peterwwillis 10y agoI need to make a Username/Password/Domain Checker As A Service. Just send me your bank account credentials and I will verify that they work for you.
- tajen 10y agoWhy 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 <port>
- cat199 10y agoyou sir, just shut this whole thread down, methinks.
- zinxq 10y agoMailinator does this too of course (with API)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mrgreenfur 10y agoAnyone seen something like this for webhooks? I want to quickly see the contents, headers and logs without building the middle-man myself.
- michaelbuckbee 10y agohttps://requestb.in/ https://requestb.in/ or https://webhook.site https://webhook.site
- rmetzler 10y agohttps://requestb.in/ https://requestb.in/
- mrgreenfur 10y agothanks!
- jkarneges 10y agohttp://webhookinbox.com/ http://webhookinbox.com/
- donmb 10y agoIs this able to track bounced mails? Then it could be used to verify emails :)
- sethammons 10y agoAs 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.
- always_good 10y agoAlso, 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.
- pm24601 10y ago* 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.
- stephenr 10y agoClaiming to be free forever AND being a service that explicitly expects you to send a bunch of real email addresses to, is almost on the level of a Nigerian prince for sketchy behaviour. I cannot believe anyone would use this service
- vmp 10y agoI made my own little debugging SMTP server in C# some time ago: https://github.com/vmp32k/MailBug/releases https://github.com/vmp32k/MailBug/releases It's not pretty but it works well enough. :)
- diamondo25 10y agoAt my previous company we used mailcatcher[1]. Worked fine, but with lots of e-mails, the service might crash. [1] https://mailcatcher.me/ https://mailcatcher.me/
- welder 10y agoSounds like inbox.py: https://github.com/kennethreitz/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.
- zackify 10y agomailtrap.io?
- LinuxBender 10y agoAnyone using postfix already has smtp-sink in their arsenal. You already have a fake SMTP server.
- haroldp 10y agoOn 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/ http://harold.internal.org/configuring-a-dev-box-mail-server... I like this a lot better than sending stuff out across the network.
- xanderstrike 10y agoMailcatcher is an even simpler solution (assuming you can install rubygems): https://mailcatcher.me/ https://mailcatcher.me/
- Arcsech 10y agoMailcatcher is available as a Docker container, so you don't even necessarily have to set up Rubygems yourself: https://hub.docker.com/r/schickling/mailcatcher/ https://hub.docker.com/r/schickling/mailcatcher/
- hobarrera 10y agohttps://github.com/mailhog/MailHog https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog looks like a really nice alternative, where you can also test HTML mail, etc. Personally, my local SMTP actually sends email, because I DO want legitimate email (mutt, cron) though, so I'd be scared to mix up two local smtp instances.
- peller 10y agoMailHog is pretty great. In response to your concern, by default it runs on a non-standard port, so you need to configure your apps to point at it (port 1025 by default). Even then, you can configure it to act as a MITM, where the webmail interface lets you "release" messages you actually want to send out: https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog/blob/master/docs/CONFIG.md#outgoing-smtp-configuration https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog/blob/master/docs/CONFIG.m...
- tijn 10y agoI 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 https://github.com/tijn/devmail
- kazinator 10y ago> 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.
- pogo77 10y agoYou're right, but it's just a suggestion. It's really up to you how you use the service, sometimes it might be handy to see real data :)
- kazinator 10y agoThe point is that you can use real data with your own isolated test bed. I'm not going to involve some random thing on the Internet in my test setup! For one thing, I'm pretty sure I'd be violating a document that I signed about promising to safeguard my client's IT security, secrets and intellectual property. Real data could be sensitive. Anything of this sort that you set up will eventually be used by other people, who don't always know the full ramifications of what they are using. Somewhere down the line, someone will leak something into the test system. Maybe a user ID or password. Names of clients. Whatever. Also, a test system has to be reliably operational. According to Murphy's Law, someone's thing you depend on on the Internet gonna disappear exactly when a lot of integration activity starts happening before a release. Lastly, you should control every aspect of a test tool. Exactly how someone's SMTP thing handles SMTP could change in subtle ways from one day to the next.
- pogo77 10y agoThanks 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 :)
- laxk 10y agoWhy not? #sudo python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25 Works pretty well for me.
- old-gregg 10y agopogo77, 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.
- Dunedan 10y agoIt's even broken with enabled JavaScript, but disabled Cookies. Sadly lots of sites are nowadays.
- soveran 10y agoSome 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 https://github.com/soveran/mailcat
- tsneed290 10y agoShameless plug https://github.com/SpartaSystems/holdmail https://github.com/SpartaSystems/holdmail
- barryoneill 10y agoYes - I worked on this as well. Very similar concept to some of the other solutions here. Self-hosted (keep mail internal, fast) - Invent any email address you like (†), trap it all here. View it via the app, or query via REST. Designed to be open, this is really useful when you don't want to have to setup mailboxes, or deal with the additional header of catch-all addressing. I'm currently adding attachment support for the next release. † This comes with the caveat that you don't use PII, because people make configuration mistakes - but if that's how you do testing, then I'd argue you have bigger problems in your organization than capturing mail. We use it with somefakeguy@ourdomain.com, someotherguy_datetime_from_automatedtest@ourdomain.com, rather than just sending stuff to _real_ addresses.
- oblib 10y agoI 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.
- smoyer 10y agoIn a Java environment, we spin up an instance of Dumbster [0] using our test harnesses, run our integration tests and tear it back down. [0] https://github.com/athalay07/dumbster https://github.com/athalay07/dumbster
- peppage 10y agoLocally you can run papercut https://papercut.codeplex.com/ https://papercut.codeplex.com/
- fs111 10y agoYou already have an SMTP Server for testing on your OS: sudo python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25
- dunham 10y agoFor testing/dev at work, I wrote a little go app that listens to SMTP on port 2525, collects mail into a boltdb, and presents it in a very simple web UI (port 7070) that lets you browse users and their mail. (A simple drill-down of list of users / emails for user / message details, including all mime parts and download links for attachments. The top page has a "clear" button.) It was an evening's work, so it's very simple, but it works and we've found it very useful. (The original idea was to very simply expose the application flows involving mail to selenium, but I've found it very useful for dev, too.)