Use an email testing tool for staging servers

Tech Testing
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Following a discussion with @maikel here: https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/pull/3209#issuecomment-466485445

I would like to propose using an email testing tool for staging servers.

Advantages I see:

  1. Dev and tester have access. So if we have problems with emails, dev can see what tester have tested quickly
  2. We can receive email with the new seed data accounts
  3. No more mistakes sending email to a real customer… (UK staging has prod data on it… yes it’s not good practice in our case but in the meantime it’s really great to have a staging server with lots of data). And if our team of tester grows, I’m afraid mistakes will be made (I did some when starting on UK staging and Nick had to apologies on my behalf… uncool for UK team :cry: ).
  4. No more test email in my gmail inbox! Well ok that one is just for me :smiley:
  5. We could actually change spree@example.com password on each staging server (and receive email on it)

On another project I work on I’ve discovered Mailtrap : https://mailtrap.io/ which is a very cool service fetching all the emails and displaying them in a web interface (login and password protected, but we can share them through bitwarden now :muscle: ). On the contrary of other email testing services I’ve used, it enables to see the email entirely (supposed sender and supposed receiver included).

But there are open source initiatives that we can use as well: Mailtrap Alternatives and Similar Sites / Apps | AlternativeTo

Thoughts? @luisramos0 @sauloperez @maikel @Matt-Yorkley @lin_d_hop

1 Like
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Mailtrap is probably the most popular service. They have a free plan which limits us to 2 emails per 10 seconds and one inbox. One alternative is Debug Mail which is a free service. I’m not sure how they fund their project or which limitations they have. Looks like they are a digital agency. Another option is free software we install ourselves. Mail Hog seems to be very easy to install and maintain. We could even integrate it with ofn-install to have it run on the staging server itself. That makes it my favourite solution because there are no limitations, we automatically separate by server and it’s very efficient.

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Both mailtrap and mailhog sound good. We need to evaluate pros and cons of both solutions including pricing and maintainance cost.