{"id":1100,"date":"2011-12-12T17:03:11","date_gmt":"2011-12-12T15:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.railsware.com\/?p=1100"},"modified":"2021-08-13T16:24:16","modified_gmt":"2021-08-13T13:24:16","slug":"mailtrap-save-your-customers-from-getting-test-emails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/mailtrap-save-your-customers-from-getting-test-emails\/","title":{"rendered":"Mailtrap: Save your customers from getting test emails."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We assume you’re a web developer<\/a>, QA engineer, product manager, etc \u2014 somebody who’s doing internet software projects. Have you ever needed to test e-mail notifications in your web application? Today we’ll speak about common issues while testing e-mail notifications and best solutions for that issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Common issues with manual e-mail notifications testing<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We believe most critical issue here is accidentally sending dummy e-mails to real customers while testing web applications at staging\/development servers. But let’s start with easier once at first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s say you’re doing users registration where every new users gets registration confirmation e-mail. In order to register yet another user for testing purposes you need to have new unique email address that should be registered somewhere. That’ll become problematic unless you’ll use service like Mailinator<\/a> which seems good enough as a solution for our problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now let’s make things a bit harder. Imagine our web application became successful and now we need to send weekly e-mail notifications to our users: a bit different for different users. How will you test that to know which e-mails were sent to which customers? Will you create tons of virtual users with tons of mail boxes and check each one? But that’s just so stupid and time-consuming!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In real life things are even worse. In my experience it is usually a good idea to copy production database to your staging servers or development machines for test purposes \u2014 so you’ll work with a real data instead of something synthetic. But this also brings you a risk of sending test e-mails to the real customers from your development\/staging environment. My personal score is about 2500 e-mails sent by mistake at a time. I know people whose personal record is more than 2 millions emails sent by mistake!<\/em> Share your personal fuck up stories in comments ;)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Existing solutions for keeping your customers from test e-mails<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

If you’re lazy or just don’t have enough time, you may skip this chapter and just scroll down to Mailtrap: our solution to common problem<\/em> because our solution is really much better that others, believe me!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So which possible solutions are most popular?
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