A quick post to share a great tool I came across. It's called inBucket and it provides a self hosted alternative to mailinator. The premise is that you can dynamically send emails to any address and check the contents of the email via a web browser (or via POP or the REST API).

At work we have just rolled it out into our low environments to assist with testing our background email processes. We intend to wire up our CI environment to the REST API to perform automated regression testing of our automated emails.

It's Open Source, written in GO, runs on Linux - listens on ports 80 (for the web interface) and 25 (smtp), 110 (pop) - it was really easy to install (great documentation!).

Here is a quote from their website:

"Need to test your webapps outbound emails with Mailinator but stuck behind a firewall Want to keep the new application you are developing secret until it’s time to release it Need to validate that emails go out as part of your integration test suite Want to send a link to a coworker demonstrating an email without giving them your gmail password Need to load test your application without melting your corporate Exchange server Want to use production data in your test environment without the risk of test messages leaking to an end user Need to preview emails in multiple desktop email clients Use Inbucket!"

They just released a new version too (version 2.0 - which includes a web based configurator). As you can see, it uses a bootstrap theme that provides a pleasant (responsive) web interface.

Here are some links to check out: