Here at The Frontier Group we were having trouble finding a simple, extensible way to look at email sent out by our web applications during development. After trying quite a few alternatives, one of our developers Sam Cochran sat down in some spare time and forced slender man into skinny jeans strapped to a mailbox to create MailCatcher.
MailCatcher is a ruby mashup to catch mail sent via SMTP to a local port and serve it in your web browser for easy testing. It lets you check out the plain text and HTML versions of the email, as well as inspecting any attachments. Thanks to WebSockets (in Google Chrome, at least) you’ll see new mail instantly as it arrives.
Installation and usage instructions can be found on the project home page. Over the coming weeks I look forward to sharing some more of our open source contributions from within TFG.
Rahul Trikha
May 18, 2011
This is very cool,
Keep up the good work
Jacques Chester
May 19, 2011
Weird; I wrote something very similar with Sinatra about 2 months ago for testing purposes. Great minds and all that. Mind you, Sam’s is basically much better for all practical purposes.
Tobias Cohen
May 20, 2011
Fantastic! I’ve been looking for something like this for years.
Brandon
May 26, 2011
Awesome! This is an amazing project. Thank you for opening it up to the world.
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Steven Haddox
May 27, 2011
Just another +1. This is an awesome tool for everyone in the community! Thanks!
Vaidyanathan B
May 31, 2011
AWESOME idea..Thank you! We’re gonna try this right away.
Bogdan Gusiev
Nov 30, 2011
Try also http://mailtrap.io : web based service.
It offers:
* All emails in one place
* Shared access for dev team to the inbox
* Developer tools to analyze emails
* Flexible configuration
Barry
Sep 27, 2012
Bonus points for mailtrap.io. The latest release of MailCatcher started creating a lot of issues for my team so we ended up uninstalling it and switching to mailtrap. The big benefit of mailtrap is that we can set it up for our staging sites on Heroku so that the rest of our team can easily access and review things while testing. With mailcatcher, it was helpful for developers only.