Fakemail for Developers

The other day when I was setting up email notifications for a Zend Framework application, I stumbled across Fakemail.

From the developers website:

fakemail is a fake mail server that captures emails as files for acceptance testing. This avoids the excessive configuration of setting up a real mail server and trying to extract mail queue content.

I am quite impressed with this handy little script (written in both Python and Perl), as it works exactly as advertised: taking out the time required to properly configure a SMTP server and saving the hassle of having dozens of test messages showered across inboxes. Instead of forwarding emails on to their recipients, it simply saves a raw copy of the email to the specified directory.

The script has a windows installer that bundles the script with python and will run on all flavors of Linux and Unix assuming that they have perl or python installed.

To configure Zend_Mail use fakemail place the following in your bootstrapper or common config file:

Zend_Mail::setDefaultTransport(new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp(‘localhost’,array(
‘port’ => 10025
)));

The ‘localhost’ variable is the address of the computer that fakemail is running on (likely the local machine). The port number is the port that is specified when fakemail is run on the command line.

For more information about fakemail, binaries, and a usage guide. Visit the developers website at Sourceforce: http://www.lastcraft.com/fakemail.php