Maileron

SMTP ==> HTTP REST JSON API

wtf

Stand-alone server for receiving email via SMTP and providing access to it via an HTTP REST JSON API. Useful for automated testing that requires receiving email and doing stuff with it. I wanted to be able to test things like the "forgot password" flow, or "email confirmation", from automated tests.

Currently has no persistence or notification. It just receives mail, serves up a mailbox as a JSON array, and lets you clear a mailbox with DELETE. That's it.

status

Prototype. Not ready for production use, but could be used for basic testing purposes.

install

npm install -g maileron

setup

sudo maileron

The sudo is required to listen to ports 25 and 80 for SMTP and HTTP, respectively. Without sudo, maileron will run on ports 9025 and 9080, which means it would only work with specially-configured mail clients.

Now, point your MX record for a domain (in my case, pat.agnoster.net) to the server running maileron (which for me is also pat.agnoster.net).

use

Send an email to [email protected], for instance:

MAIL [email protected]
Subject: Hello World

How are you?

Then hit the webserver (in this example, pat.agnoster.net) and check it out (some values elided for clarity):

GET /inbox/example

200 OK
Content-type: application/json

[
  {
    "text": "How are you?",
    "headers": { ... },
    "subject": "Hello World",
    "from": [
      {
        "address": "[email protected]",
        "name": "Isaac Wolkerstorfer"
      }
    ],
    "to": "example",
    "envelope": {
      "from": "[email protected]",
      "to": ["[email protected]"],
      "date": "2012-08-23T17:50:20.013Z"
    }
  },
  ...
]

That's really all there is to it. You can DELETE a mailbox to clear it.

ideas

GET test.example.com/inbox/example.user.1/?limit=1&timeout=60

Wait for the next mail to come into this mailbox. This means you can easily do a DELETE, perform an action that should trigger an email, then issue a GET ?limit&timeout to wait for the email to show up.

license = MIT