Question

I’m testing several user accounts and don’t want to setup different emails to test with. All I need to know is if the email has been sent from my app successfully.

Is there a way to setup a fake email inbox to check that email messages are being sent in Ruby on Rails?

Answer 1

Set up MailCatcher:

MailCatcher runs a super simple SMTP server which catches any message sent to it to display in a web interface. Run mailcatcher, set your favourite app to deliver to smtp://127.0.0.1:1025 instead of your default SMTP server, then check out http://127.0.0.1:1080 to see the mail that’s arrived so far.

This does several useful things for you:

• Not only can you see that email is being sent but you can look at the email (text and HTML parts) as well.
• You won’t have to worry about spamming anyone as all the email your application sends goes straight to MailCatcher.
• You won’t have to worry about setting up a bunch of real email accounts anywhere, MailCatcher doesn’t care what the addresses are, it just grabs the email and shows it to you.

Most importantly, your application doesn’t have to change to use it, you just set up the appropriate SMTP values and away you go. This means that you’re not running different code paths for your email handling in development, testing, and production and that means fewer bugs and late night disaster calls.