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Show HN: MailMock – Simplified Email Testing for Developers

I work at a software consulting company where we often face the challenge of testing email functionality in non-production environments. Typically, email sending is disabled in development and staging, making it difficult to verify whether emails are formatted correctly or even sent at all without making significant code changes. I experimented with self-hosting an SMTP server, but the maintenance overhead was too high. This led to the idea for MailMock, which offers a simpler solution: by simply changing the SMTP credentials, you can redirect emails without the need for server management or code rewrites. MailMock is a tool designed for developers to test emails in development and staging environments. It captures emails into dedicated test inboxes, allowing you to validate your app's or website's email flow. Features include multi-user collaboration and an email retention policy of up to 90 days, making debugging and testing easier. On the technical side, MailMock is built using C# for the backend, React for the frontend, and SQLite as the database. You can try MailMock by signing up [here](https://mailmock.dev/sign-up https://mailmock.dev/sign-up). Once you sign up, you can create a project and immediately start testing by changing your SMTP settings to point to our service. Let me know what you think, or if you have any issues or suggestions!

Oras 2y ago
Have you heard about Mailhog [0]? I used it 10 years ago, and it has everything you need and runs locally. Going to the cloud is no different from creating free emails to test. https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog
- daneavanderbilt 2y ago
  I'm familiar with Mailhog. The tool I used when running an SMTP server locally was SMTP4Dev, which is similar. Local solutions like those are great when you're running your system locally, but can become a bit of a headache when you're trying to run them in the cloud and manage security, updates, and access to multiple team members. Free emails for testing can also work, but then you have to manage access to that email account (if you're dealing with multiple team members that need access) and have the ability to modify the destination of any of the emails sent from your system. You'll also lose the ability to view the actual destination of those emails, which can be valuable information for testing.
hahn-kev 2y ago
I use https://github.com/maildev/maildev https://github.com/maildev/maildev which you can run from docker. But +1 for dotnet, don't see much of that these days.
- daneavanderbilt 2y ago
  Cool that you can run that just from a Docker container. Thanks for the dotnet love! I use it for work, so it was a natural choice for building MailMock.

Oras 2y ago

Have you heard about Mailhog [0]? I used it 10 years ago, and it has everything you need and runs locally. Going to the cloud is no different from creating free emails to test. https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog

daneavanderbilt 2y ago
I'm familiar with Mailhog. The tool I used when running an SMTP server locally was SMTP4Dev, which is similar. Local solutions like those are great when you're running your system locally, but can become a bit of a headache when you're trying to run them in the cloud and manage security, updates, and access to multiple team members. Free emails for testing can also work, but then you have to manage access to that email account (if you're dealing with multiple team members that need access) and have the ability to modify the destination of any of the emails sent from your system. You'll also lose the ability to view the actual destination of those emails, which can be valuable information for testing.

hahn-kev 2y ago

I use https://github.com/maildev/maildev https://github.com/maildev/maildev which you can run from docker. But +1 for dotnet, don't see much of that these days.

daneavanderbilt 2y ago
Cool that you can run that just from a Docker container. Thanks for the dotnet love! I use it for work, so it was a natural choice for building MailMock.