MailDev - Mail Server on Your Local Environment

Takahiro Iwasa

Aug 10, 2021

1 min read

MailDev

When developing an application, MailDev is useful to send and receive emails within user’s local environment.

www.npmjs.com

maildev

SMTP Server and Web Interface for reading and testing emails during development. Latest version: 2.1.0, last published: 10 months ago. Start using maildev in your project by running `npm i maildev`. There are 11 other projects in the npm registry using maildev.

Create Dockerfile using the example below.

FROM node:14-alpine
EXPOSE 1080
EXPOSE 1025
RUN npm i -g maildev
CMD ["maildev"]

MailDev uses two ports, 1080 for its management console and 1025 for SMTP. These can be changed by options.

Create docker-compose.yml using the example below.

version: '3'
services:
  mail:
    container_name: mail
    build: ./
    ports:
      - "1080:1080"
      - "1025:1025"

Launch the Docker container with the following command.

docker-compose up -d mail

To access the management console, open your browser and go to http://localhost:1080.

Because I’m writing this post using Windows, the example below uses Send-MailMessage command by PowerShell.

learn.microsoft.com

Send-MailMessage (Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility) - PowerShell

The Send-MailMessage cmdlet sends an email message from within PowerShell. You must specify a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server or the Send-MailMessage command fails. Use the SmtpServer parameter or set the $PSEmailServer variable to a valid SMTP server. The value assigned to $PSEmailServer is the default SMTP setting for PowerShell. For more information, see about_Preference_Variables. Warning The Send-MailMessage cmdlet is obsolete. This cmdlet doesn't guarantee secure connections to SMTP servers. While there is no immediate replacement available in PowerShell, we recommend you do not use Send-MailMessage. For more information, see Platform Compatibility note DE0005.

Send-MailMessage `
>> -from 'dev@localhost' `
>> -to 'dev.to@localhost' `
>> -subject 'subject' `
>> -body 'test' `
>> -smtpServer 'localhost' `
>> -port 1025

You should see a new email received in the management console.

Thanks to MailDev, developers can easily test email sending functionality.

I hope you will find this post useful.