Mockbox

Free, ephemeral, and fast online SMTP server mock. The no frills, no sign-up alternative to Mailtrap: just quick and easy verification that your application is sending the emails you expect.

Note that Mockbox is not an ephemeral email address system. It is solely for simulating SMTP servers to SMTP clients; emails sent from a regular address won't make it.

Get Started

$ git clone https://github.com/jkingsman/Mockbox.git # Clone the mockbox repo
$ pip install -r requirements.txt # install dependencies
$ sudo python Mockbox.py # run that puppy

Runs by default on ports 80 (HTTP), 9000 (HTTP/WebSockets), and 587 (SMTP).

If you configure SSL, make sure you enable it and point it to valid keys in Config.py. Note that port 25 is often blocked, hence the use of the 'standard' SMTP backup port of 587.

Development and Backend

Mockbox.py spawns two threads, a Web thread and a Mailbox thread. The Web thread serves static files from /static/dist and handles websocket serving. The Mailbox thread receives and parses emails, smacks the attachments around a little bit, and pushes a nice dictionary onto the shared thread queue for the Web thread to munch through and push down the websocket.

Front end development uses gulp; write your code in /static/src/ and run gulp (for one-time static file generation) or gulp watch (for continuous background file watching and local file serving). The front end does some funky rolling of the JS and Jade files -- 99% of work is in /static/src/jade/index.jade and /static/src/js/index.js. New libraries go in the /static/src/lib folder and should be uglified in the js-lib gulp task.

To customize the site to your domain name, change the domain in Config.py, but it will still function correctly if you fail to set that; it will just generate email addresses at the mockbox.io domain.

Running Mockbox with the -v flag will output logging to std. out, not the log file - handy for debugging without tailing.

Future Development/TODO

• Testing
• Refactor front end (at least away from jQuery; ideally to a front end framework)
• Import SSMTPD to allow for encrypted SMTP connections

Local Server

Don't need something web accessible? Run a local no-frills server with vanilla python:

sudo python -m smtpd -c DebuggingServer -n localhost:25