Mailtrap and Mailshovel: Simple Rails mailer testing31 Mar 08

Mailtrap is a minimal SMTP server that runs on your development machine. Actionmailer can talk to it. I've just added Mailshovel, a minimal POP3 server, that will talk to your email program. This means that you can:

1. Run 'mailtrap start'
2. Test your Rails app on localhost
3. Receive the sent emails in real email programs

It saves you from setting up dummy email accounts and real SMTP servers, and it's better than tailing the logs, because it allows you to check for formatting problems. I use it to help with complex mime/multipart + attachment messages.

This is based on the work of Matt Mower (matt.blogs.it). Coming soon: a re-released mailtrap, which will mean that you can get this whole thing with just 'gem install mailtrap'.

Until then, grab it from git, build the gem, and install it:

http://github.com/gwynm/mailtrap/tree/master

Patches welcome; it's probably best to fork the git repository, then send me a pull request. I'd like to play with this git thing more.

If "grab it from git, build the gem, and install it" wasn't very helpful, you can check out my more detailed article on github.