Email Testing - Viewing HTML emails

I wanted to write a follow up to my post on email testing. I could now easily capture an email, using DevNull SMTP, but I also wanted to view the email as if I had just received it.

To do this all I needed to do was copy the plain text of the email message to a .eml file and then open the .eml file in a email client. In my case I copied the email from the DevNull SMTP email server applet and into a test.eml file. I then opened up Outlook Express and dragged the test.eml file into the client. Outlook Express was able to render plain text or HTML emails just fine, which is exactly what I was looking for.

Send email testing

Wanting to test the send email code before uploading my latest website I dug around for ways to test a send email script that I had written in PHP.

One suggestion is to code a public SMTP server information into the send script. Some popular public SMTP servers include Gmail or your ISP SMTP. GMail requires TLY encryption so the email library better support TLY to use the GMail option. My email library didn't, I am using the Email component in CakePHP. I didn't try my ISP SMTP because I was too lazy to call up the Time Warner to get my username and password.

Another option is to run your own SMTP server and run your emails through that. One program that does this is ArGoSoft Mail Server and others exist, especially in the Linux environment. While I liked that idea better I didn't really want to send my emails. I just wanted to make sure that they were getting to the SMTP correctly. I also was a little concerned that a spammer might take advantage of my temporary smtp server while I had my firewall open.

Finally I came across some "fake" smtp servers that are designed for testing send email scripts. A few of them include fakemail, dumpster, ndumpster, but I ended up using DevNull SMTP. DevNull SMTP is a Java application that can be loaded as an applet. No installation solution, HURRAY!

Happy testing send email scripts!