[HN Gopher] MailCrab
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       MailCrab
        
       Author : lukastyrychtr
       Score  : 178 points
       Date   : 2023-03-03 15:24 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tweedegolf.nl)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tweedegolf.nl)
        
       | rikkipitt wrote:
       | Looking forward to trying this out. I do a lot of email testing
       | locally for paced.email and vend.email. MailHog is 90% of the way
       | there, but seems like it's fallen by the wayside...
        
       | cheapliquor wrote:
       | snibbety snab
        
       | orra wrote:
       | I don't know if the author is on here, but I wonder what it was
       | like doing the frontend in Rust (Yew). How does the developer
       | experience compare to Vue, I suppose?
        
       | tigerlily wrote:
       | Tweede golf, means "second wave" in dutch.
        
         | Aachen wrote:
         | Which sounded like a covid thing to me. Must have been
         | interesting to watch the access logs for tweedegold.nl in fall
         | 2020! (That is, I assume the name was chosen before covid but
         | the About page doesn't say.)
        
       | achairapart wrote:
       | In this space there is also Mailpit[0], written in GO, runs from
       | a single binary (also has Docker images).
       | 
       | [0]: https://github.com/axllent/mailpit
        
         | ed25519FUUU wrote:
         | A tiny cross-platform binary, a tiny docker image image? That's
         | every bullet point but the written in rust one!
        
         | xslvrxslwt wrote:
         | According to Discord, Go was (or at least it used to) cause
         | huge latency spikes because of it's GC - they've rewritten it
         | in Rust and now it's A LOT faster, without any latency spikes.
         | 
         | https://discord.com/blog/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to...
        
           | joaonmatos wrote:
           | Which is a factor that really does not matter for a test
           | server
        
           | Scaevolus wrote:
           | 300ms latency spikes on a particularly pathological
           | production workload are irrelevant for the stated use case of
           | a test email server.
        
           | kodah wrote:
           | The GC iterations they were talking about were during
           | incredibly high throughout. Most users would not notice this.
           | It's not some general indictment of Go.
        
       | RobertRoberts wrote:
       | It's finding systems like this that make HN valuable from time to
       | time. I didn't even "think" to look for a system like this, and I
       | could use it right now, and I find there are multiple other ones
       | similar in the same posting from comments.
        
       | emptysea wrote:
       | One of the things I like about Django is the builtin support for
       | a console backend for emails
       | 
       | In dev it means you can have sent emails get logged to the
       | terminal which makes debugging easier.
       | 
       | But it only really works well with text emails, this seems like a
       | more robust solution
        
         | nickjj wrote:
         | The terminal solution is handy but sometimes it fails because
         | you could end up with a sign in link or some type of link with
         | a very long token that wraps to multiple lines making it
         | impossible to click.
         | 
         | Rails also prints emails to the terminal and has a backend
         | solution that doesn't really send emails out but I still prefer
         | using MailCatcher to display them in a UI (it has both amd64
         | and arm64 Docker support[0], real-time updates and a ~25mb
         | compressed Docker image).
         | 
         | [0]: https://hub.docker.com/r/schickling/mailcatcher/tags
        
           | noduerme wrote:
           | It also just works for all frameworks if you hack the
           | receiver and BCC: emails you want to test to yourself to make
           | sure they're actually being sent and look alright.
        
         | axelthegerman wrote:
         | Yep very nice if all you need is an email or two, maybe an
         | activation code or link.
         | 
         | Definitely an email heavy application benefits from something
         | more advanced like MailCrab
         | 
         | PS Ruby on Rails also logs emails to the console
        
       | tiffanyh wrote:
       | Embarrassed to ask, so what's the use case for this?
        
         | ed25519FUUU wrote:
         | One use-case I can think of is integration and validation
         | tests. Send emails, then use the API to programmatically
         | retrieve and check content.
        
         | ianpurton wrote:
         | It's really useful during development to test email send
         | functionality in your app.
        
       | andrei_says_ wrote:
       | Like the Ruby mailcatcher?
        
       | tambourine_man wrote:
       | Typo
       | 
       | * _its_ own bullet
        
       | brightball wrote:
       | For shared non-production environments, I've always been a big
       | fan of Mailtrap.io in this space.
       | 
       | Same idea of faking delivery but puts it in a location where non-
       | devs can access and review it.
       | 
       | https://mailtrap.io/
        
         | jerz wrote:
         | You could also look at https://imitate.email
         | 
         | Similar idea to mailtrap but has a web widget so that you can
         | embed it in the projects you're building, improving the UX for
         | devs and testers.
         | 
         | (Disclaimer: It's mine!)
        
         | Ocha wrote:
         | Also, there is https://mailsnag.com that has more generous free
         | plan and error simulations. Helped me uncover couple bugs in my
         | projects
        
         | drewjoh wrote:
         | There's also: https://usehelo.com
        
       | jbergstroem wrote:
       | Longtime mailhog user here; this looks like a nice improvement
       | for cold start developer environments! Another option in the same
       | space (emphasis container size) is
       | https://github.com/inbucket/inbucket
        
       | dcormier wrote:
       | That's nice since MailHog seems dead. I've had PRs open for their
       | SMTP server package for years. One for a bug, the other to
       | support Unicode recipient addresses.
       | 
       | Once I got one of their attention on Twitter and they said they
       | would have it looked at the next week, but nothing seemed to
       | happen.
        
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       (page generated 2023-03-05 23:02 UTC)