You have probably read our previous post about a few awesome tricks from Gmail that help you test your app emails with development addresses. That’s nice and pretty useful I would say, but what if I told that you could use any email address you want in your app with minimum effort?
At Hipwerk we are using a pretty nifty tool called Mailtrap from @Railsware. This is a SMTP service which literally traps any email sent from your app and stores them into a special inbox. Then you can check your messages from a simple webmail application provided by Mailtrap. Users may auto-forward any message to a real email address if it’s necessary.
Mailtrap is a fake SMTP server for development teams to test, view and share emails sent from the development and staging environments without spamming real customers. (official website)
That’s pretty cool, right? You can now use any email address, even stuff like:
This way you won’t pollute your work or personal inbox with tons of test messages and you avoid the embarasing situation when you accidentaly send a test email to a client while testing your app. You’ll probably say: “that’s great, but I don’t want all my emails to go in single inbox, I have multiple apps with various environments, I’ll probably end up in a mess and I’ll still be forced to have multiple accounts”. No worries, Mailtrap let’s you define multiple inboxes, each with their own separate configuration and credentials.
Even better; Mailtrap has yet another very useful feature: mailbox sharing. Imagine that you work in a team and you could share the same inbox for emails with all the team members. This way you won’t need to forward emails back and forth just so you can show to a colleague some wrong formatting or typos you discovered in one of your app emails.
Last but not least, Mailtrap analyzes your email and generates a spam & blacklist report. Then it tests your email HTML for compatibility issues with popular mail clients and platforms.
We have been using this tool for quite some time now and we are very happy with it. But hey! Don’t take my word, give it a try and drop a comment, tell us what you think or just spread the word about this awesome tool.
This post is the first from a series about the tools we use to make our lives easier and to build awesome stuff without the headache.
Till next time, stay tuned. We’ll be back with more goodies.
Cheers!
Originally published at blog.hipwerk.com on November 18, 2014.
