Mailcatching¶

Advocating Mailcatcher!

Sometimes a piece of software needs a mailserver to function but you don’t have one for some reason. Mailcatcher may come in handy then:

Catches mail and serves it through a dream.

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.

And, I must say, it works like a charm!

mailcatcher –help

Usage: mailcatcher [options]

--ip IP	Set the ip address of both servers
--smtp-ip IP	Set the ip address of the smtp server
--smtp-port PORT
	Set the port of the smtp server
--http-ip IP	Set the ip address of the http server
--http-port PORT
	Set the port address of the http server
--no-quit	Don’t allow quitting the process
-f, --foreground
	Run in the foreground
-v, --verbose	Be more verbose
-h, --help	Display this help information

For example, in my case, I simply start mailcatcher this way, to make it ready for development with a Discourse Docker instance:

mailcatcher -f --smtp-ip 172.17.42.1 --smtp-port 1025

Note the -f switch which keeps the task in the foreground. Otherwise you have to find out which process it is (ps aux) and kill that task. To stop it as a foreground task is easier.

Email services for developers may be an alternative:

• Mailgun
• Mandrill
• Mailjet

But: Mailcatcher is local and great!