Introduction
MailCatcher is a tool that provides an easy way for developers to inspect emails that their applications send out without having to wait for an email provider. It catches all emails that it receives, and stores them for display. Both HTML and plain text messages are supported.
Installation
First update apt’s repository list, then install build-essentials (for the make command), and MailCatcher’s dependencies (Ruby and SQLite).
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential software-properties-common
sudo apt-get install -y libsqlite3-dev ruby1.9.1-dev
Install MailCatcher.
sudo gem install mailcatcher
Running MailCatcher
Once installed, you can run mailcatcher --help to see what options are available.
Start MailCatcher by running mailcatcher --ip [your-aklwebhost-ip-address] on your terminal. Your output should look similar to the following:
root@install:~# mailcatcher --ip [your-aklwebhost-ip-address]
Starting MailCatcher
==> smtp://[your-aklwebhost-ip-address]:1025
==> http://[your-aklwebhost-ip-address]:1080
*** MailCatcher runs as a daemon by default. Go to the web interface to quit.
Browse to http://[your-aklwebhost-ip-address]:1080 and you’ll see MailCatcher’s web interface. Configure your application to use an SMTP host of your Aklwebhost IP Address, and port 1025 and send out some test emails. These emails will appear on MailCatcher’s web interface.
Conclusion
MailCatcher can really ease up the development and testing workflow, as it takes out the need for a mail provider to catch and view emails. Consider trying it for your next application.