I am writing a program that will be emailing reports out many (~100) clients which I want to test before I spam everyone.
I want to do a test run against my production data and actually send the messages to a SMTP server, but I don't want the SMTP server to actually deliver the messages. I want the server to act like a real SMTP server from the perspective of my application, but instead of delivering messages, I just want it to store the messages, and log what happened.
Is there a SMTP server specifically designed for testing purposes?
Does anyone know of a way to configure exim or postfix to behave like I have described above
What do you use to test a mass-email delivery?
In java you can use dumbster
Its easy to use and you can validate every aspect of the email you are intercepting.
It's a Java SMTP server implementation meant for unit testing. (Just make sure you redirect your email to the machine running dumbster...)
I just found another alternative that do almost the same: Greenmail
Greenmail also support POP3, IMAP with SSL so you can test your client against it.
For .NET I set the config file to deliver mail to a folder, then you can have the automated test inspect the directory and files.
<system.net>
<mailSettings>
<smtp deliveryMethod="SpecifiedPickupDirectory">
<specifiedPickupDirectory pickupDirectoryLocation="c:\pickupDirectory"/>
</smtp>
</mailSettings>
</system.net>
While searching for options I found the following that may be useful.
DevNullSmtp
Use a null SMTP server for testing
Fake SMTP Service
twisted examples/emailserver.tac
"The Wiser framework for unit testing mail"
I've heard of a few other developers moving from Dumbster to Wiser and have migrated my testing code as well. One of the Java components that I've worked on sends thousands of emails a day and I've written unit tests for the different email templates and scenarios using Dumbster and Wiser. I prefer Wiser.
Snips from the Wiser website (http://code.google.com/p/subethasmtp/wiki/Wiser):
Wiser is a smart replacement for Dumbster and is built on top of the SubEtha SMTP Java library which allows your Java application to receive SMTP mail with a simple, easy-to-understand API.
A good program for email testing is smtp4dev (Windows only).
It's a dummy SMTP server. Sits in the system tray and does not deliver the received messages. The received messages can be quickly viewed, saved and the source/structure inspected.
http://smtp4dev.codeplex.com/
http://skaraarslan.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-to-check-email-works-without-using.html
(this presumes you are using .net to send emails)
Given that you mention exim and postfix (which I'm taking to be some kind of unix stuff), this answer might not be as useful as it could be, but check out Neptune. It's a fake SMTP server designed for automated testing. If you've got a spare windows box floating around, you could put Neptune on that then configure your app to send "through" the Neptune server.
Exim can be configured to accept incoming mails but not deliver them. Look for the keywords queue_only and queue_only_file in the documentation.
I personally modify the e-mail addresses to test, I send them to a dummy account of mine, that way I can validate not only that they sent, but that they appear in the proper format.
At my office, we have a server that is set up to always send all incoming mail to one address, regardless of who it's actually addressed to. We just point all our testing environments at that server and watch the QA mailbox fill up. I don't know what server it is, but it's probably some open source thing someone found.
Sendmail has a Test Mode.
You just invoke sendmail with the -bt parameter. As an example:
/usr/lib/sendmail -bt -Ciu-testconfiguration.cf
Please be aware that in this method, Sendmail requires an special configuration on rewrite rules. You need to understand how Sendmail rewrites addresses in order to properly create a .cf file for Test Mode.
Edit: See this article: http://ussg.iu.edu/usail/mail/debugging/
After not beeing happy with the solutions I found, I ended up writing developmentSMTP, easy to use, 100% Java --> cross platform.
Supports writing emails to file, forwarding emails or simply printing them on stdout.
Post Hoc is a pure Java application that looks exactly like an SMTP server to the application you are testing, but it simply collects all the email messages and allows you to inspect them using a web interface.
Freely available at: Post Hoc GitHub Site
For more information: PostHoc: Testing Apps that Send Email
If you're looking to manually test that the email sends and that the email template has the right kind of html and css that you're expecting, then I would recommend maildev https://www.npmjs.com/package/maildev. You can install and run it as a node module and also as a docker container! I've found it extremely handy for basic sanity testing of emails.
Related
We currently have POP3 mail accounts where I am and try as I might to convince my manager that we should be using hosted IMAP or Exchange he won't budge because of the cost. The staff are mostly out of office so there is no domain server here, however, we do have a dedicated server and I wondered whether I could use this to collect the mail and distribute it from there in some way.
Effectively what I'm trying to do is ensure mail is stored somewhere other than the end users machine because backups are user dependant at the moment. With hosted Exchange or Exchange on this server would be simple but my manager won't shell out for it. I have seen free mail servers called MailEnable and Axigen but unsure if they will do the job. Sorry if this seems like an easy or stupid question but never needed to do this before.
I am assuming due to the reference to Exchange that you are on Windows.
If you have an old box lying around that works, you could install linux on it and then choose from a number of different imap servers. Dovecot and Courier are both good choices and I have worked with them before.
You could use fetchmail to then pick up the mailboxes and then deliver to the imap boxes or get them deliver directly.
Setting up such a linux server for email was one of the first things I ever did on Linux. While initially daunting, once you get the hang of it, it is pretty straightforward and there are plenty of resources out there to help.
Ubuntu is probably the easiest to get used to. CentOs is also a reasonable choice.
You shouldn't be running your own server if you aren't willing to administer your own server, and they are not easy to configure if you don't know what you are doing (e.g., you mess up and you are exploited for spamming).
Look into a service like mailgun. In my application we are using them for forwarding to REST endpoints as well as onto another SMTP server.
Competitors that wound up not meeting my needs but may meet yours include Dyn, email yak, Sendgrid, etc. etc.
Why not just setup the mail clients to store their mail files on a standard network drive or share? I follow that this situation is pretty silly in your view - 100% because of the ridiculous constraints that you are being asked to work within: I would similarly find the solution I am suggesting ridiculous generally; but under the circumstances, it seems like a simple answer to your problem - replacing distributed mail storage and backup with centralized storage and backup.
Don't POP3 email clients have the option keep a copy on the server? Mine certainly does. See second tick box on the pic.
You can then periodically take a back up of all the emails from the server to stop it getting clogged up.
I run my own mail server. It uses procmail to filter incoming mail, which is then stored in maildirs and gets served out my MUA using IMAP. I've got about 1.5GB of email is 135000 inodes.
This all works very nicely. However, I'd rather like to stop using maildir and switch to something more efficient --- maildb, or Dovecot's dbox, for example. Unfortunately, procmail can only deliver to a very limited set of backing store formats (Maildir, MH and mbox, AFAICT).
What I'd really like to do is to persuade procmail to deliver email via IMAP, rather than writing it directly to the backing store; this means that I can change the backing store format whenever I like without needing to reconfigure procmail. But I can't find any way of doing this. Any ideas?
(I'm also interested in any other mail filter tools that work like procmail but support IMAP. The only other filter tool I know is maildrop --- but that has similar restrictions to procmail.)
Okay, here's a proper solution.
The cone project (http://www.courier-mta.org/cone/cone00index.html, Debian project: cone) has a very handy tool called mailtool which will copy files between mailbox types, including remote IMAP servers.
So, to deliver a message to a remote mailbox, you need a script which:
writes out the incoming message to a file (which becomes a one-message mbox folder)
does mailtool -tofolder destinationfolder -copyto imaps://username:password#server.com mbox:/full/path/to/message.mbox
That will then upload the message.
I don't actually need to do this any more so don't have a prepared script to post, but of the eight or nine different IMAP tools available, this was the only one that would actually do this, so it's worth documenting as such.
As a partial answer to my own question, it seems that Dovecot does come with a deliver tool specifically designed for this kind of thing; it works from procmail with a line like:
| /usr/lib/dovecot/deliver -m "Folder.Name"
...and it figures out all the rest of the settings automatically.
So now I can change the Dovecot mail storage format and everything will still work; but I'd still like an approach that actually uses IMAP to deliver the messages, so that I can try IMAP servers other than Dovecot's.
I have some ideas about the next email services. So I would like to build a world-class email server.
(The kind of mail server that could compete with Gmail and Hotmail in a near futur - say, two years.)
How should I start ? I mean, what language and what kind of repository ? Ruby, Java ? Oracle, MySQL ?
Any open source suggestion (I already know JAMES) ?
Thank you.
Yave you looked at the source for the most widely used email server to get an idea of what to use and what their strengths and weaknesses are?
Some MTAs to look at are Postfix, QMail, Exim and Sendmail. Here is a good comparison of those: http://shearer.org/MTA_Comparison
I recently developed an email hosting solution, http://fijisoftware.com/ based on top of Postfix and must say it is a very robust server and can handle hundreds of thousands of users per server. I chose it because it's used by the largest open source email solution, http://www.zimbra.com/. I'd suggest studing the architecture of that server.
Usually mail servers are part MTA to handle SMTP and the other part that handles POP and IMAP are usually separate programs integrated, such as Courier, Dovecot etc. So you'd have to compare and study those as well.
I'm looking to start using an SMTP or mail relay service. I've found quite a few out there, but I'm not sure if there are advantages to one vs another. The only requirements I have are:
can send "from" more than 1 domain (possibly >20 for all the different sites I work on)
can pay for a higher limit (I may need to send as many as 15000 in 1 day, although the average is <500)
can send from PHP (although I doubt this will be a problem as most are compatible with any language)
I'm okay with an SMTP service, mail relay service or a site that uses a custom API, although an API would make the conversion more difficult.
Reasons for wanting to do this:
I don't want to host any mail services my self as they just cause head aches
I don't have to worry about being blacklisted. If they are blacklisted they will know about it and have the knowledge to get it fixed.
Reporting on if emails have gone through would be nice.
I'm not sure why you would need this. If you read the proper RFCs (822, 2822, 823, 2823), you should be able to connect to any given site directly using SMTP. You need to be a little careful with Line Endings (should always be CRLF), and should probably add mail.add_x_header = OFF to your php.ini.
However, if you need a relay, I recommend using a spam filtering provider, as then you have protection from being blacklisted due to spammers abusing email-generating forms. I would recommend Red Condor for this task, but that is only because I work there, and know that we can handle it.
I've started using Mandrill and found it to be a great, reliable service provided by MailChimp that includes enough for most sites to use for free. Easy to setup, but also has a lot more functionality available.
I want to send out one off emails from a linux server. The server does not need to receive emails back.
Is there a simpler solution than sendmail for sending outgoing emails only?
I would prefer to use Perl to send the email.
Calling out to /usr/lib/sendmail is usually the preferred method because it handles delivery problems correctly. This does not mean using sendmail. Most (all?) mail transport system provide a command that's just named sendmail and provides an interface compatible to the original.
Alternatively you can send directly through a SMTP relay using a package like Net::SMTP but be extra sure to correctly cater for delivery problems.
Sendmail is not the only choice. you can use Postfix, Qmail, and many others
my Perl scripts call the mailx command. to know how to use it, type 'man mailx'
However this require to have a MTA correclty configured.
Or you can just use the Net::SMTP perl library and use your smtp server of choice
I have used msmtp successfully, ie it supports great authentication
TJ Luoma did a nice writeup of it on TUAW
I find nullmailer a very useful solution for the described scenario. Nullmailer is a sendmail/qmail/etc replacement MTA which relays to a fixed set of mail servers. It is very simple to configure and consumes little resources.
One important advantage of nullmailer over other mentioned solutions like mstmp and ssmtp is that it maintains a queue of emails to be sent. The application sending the mail is blocked only a very short time while the mail is queued (milliseconds). The sending of the mail happens in the context of a another process.
Solutions like mstmp and ssmtp don't maintain a queue of email. The sending happens in the context of the application, thereby blocking the application. Sending an email this way can easily take 1 to 2 seconds or longer. This may not be a problem in many cases but can become a problem if the email is sent by a web application.
http://untroubled.org/nullmailer/
You do not need a mail transport agent (MTA) instance on the machine doing the sending if you have another mailserver already running in your organization: you can make Perl deliver the email through SMTP to that server, so there's no need for having (another) MTA like sendmail on "your" machine.
I'm fond of creating a gmail or other free account and then using the java mail api in J2EE to send messages (from your new gmail account) to whoever... Typically i'll create a Mailer class which can be constructed with a default constructor and then give it a send(String dest, String subj, String body[, Obj attach...if you want]) and then in your case you might wrap the thing in a main method so that you can call it from else with some command line args, or call from within some java program. If you interested i'll shoot you the code.
I know you said perl, but the simplest cross-platform email sending library I have used is python's smtplib. Certainly worth a look.