The Problem
Email delivery is probably one of the most frustrating aspects of online application testing. Unlike other aspects of software testing, email delivery testing cannot be confined in a "sandbox". Normally you need to set up a working mail server in order to deliver emails to the recipients.

In a typical scenario, you trigger an email from the application and log in to the destination email account to check for its arrival. All is fine if you find the expected email in the inbox. However, things get more interesting when you can't find the email as expected. Maybe the email is on its way and you simply didn't wait long enough. But how long to wait? You have to use your best judgement. Now suppose that you decided that long enough time has passed and the email definitely isn't arriving, what can you say about the application? That it didn't send the email in the first pace? Maybe the mail server you set up for testing purposes wasn't working as expected? Or could it be that some spam filter on the way filtered out your message? Maybe the application sent the email to a different recipient (for example, it sent the email to the supplier instead of the client due to some bug in the application logic).

When you are testing, the email is delivered to real, working email addresses. Did it ever happen to you that your client received a test email message and wondered what it's about? To prevent that from happening, some organizations perform "email address cleansing" after their test environment get a "data refresh" from the production environment. However, the "email address cleansing" step often falls through the cracks and clients still get bogus messages from testing activities.

The Solution
ΞMailStop is designed to ease the pain in testing emails. It helps to answer the questions of whether the application tried to send an email and to whom. For email testing, you set up ΞMailStop as the SMTP server and use its web frontend to view the message contents. When an email is sent, the message is immediately available in the outbox of the sender. ΞMailStop traps the message and feeds it directly to the web frontend. Emails are never delivered to the actual recipients.

The Howto

  1. Set your SMTP host to: smtp.ximailstop.com, SMTP port to: 8025
  2. Send an email message through SMTP (see the samples page for sample programs for various languages).
  3. Enter the sender's email address at the upper left corner of this page and click "Go".

Limitations

  1. There is no authentication mechanism other than the email address of the sender. Anyone who entered the correct sender's email address will be able to see the email messages. If you happen to use the same sender's email address as other people, your test messages will be mixed together with theirs (for example, if you chose test@example.com).
  2. You need connectivity from your testing sandbox to smtp.ximailstop.com on port 8025. This may be a problem if your test box is confined within a corporate LAN.
  3. The raw message size is limited to 1MB (actual maximum attachment size is smaller).
  4. A maximum of 3 messages can be sent on a single connection.
  5. You have to wait 5 seconds before making the next connection.

Going Beyond
If you would like to have a copy of ΞMailStop installed behind your corporate firewalls and go beyond the above limitations, please contact us for the enterprise edition.