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Interesting, but the problem with writing HTML e-mail is rarely real-browser testing, but rather, testing the convoluted filtering/rendering of the various webmail clients (Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail).
It would be great if this app provided some other functionality that helps with problems like that.

For instance, MailChimp takes CSS styles and modifies your HTML by placing your CSS into inline style tags. This is great, because you can have cleaner markup but still support clients that don't apply CSS well.

Litmus will take an HTML email and run it through all sorts of mail clients, providing screenshots of how each one renders: http://litmusapp.com

(I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just found the app to be very useful while working on a recent project)

This is not the goal of mocksmtp. It's for first level testing. Checking html and correcting rendering with webkit. Then of course you need to test other mail/weblmail reader or with litmus as mention before.

It's like make HTML/CSS for a webpage. First level, you create you HTML/CSS code and test it with Firefox usually. Then when you are happy with, you check safari/chrome and debug IE :).

this is not the goal of mocksmtp. It's for first level testing. Checking html and correcting rendering with webkit. Then of course you need to test other mail/weblmail reader
This is great! I was working on revamping the emails we send out a few weeks ago and spend a long, painful time working in terminal with tail -f development.log | grep -A 30 -B 5 Mime-Version
Very nice. I was thinking about writing a "web service" version of this exact idea, but this will do in the meantime!
Awesome! I have been looking for something like this for a long time!
How is this different than just sending yourself the email?
If I understood well:

1/ it works offline (think git vs svn) - so you can work in a train for instance

2/ if you test your app with real data (ie: many different emails), you're sure no email will go out by mistake

3/ you can use as many recipients as you want (with any kind of address) and see the emails right away

I could be wrong though - my understanding!

Because if you use a real smtp server: - Sometimes setup are not easy (like using gmail in a rails app) - It's not instant - You need a internet connection.