Re: wxMailServer: GUI tool to help you with testing Django e-mails

Hi, 

While not as flash as a the guy driven approach.  You can use a simple python one liner to setup a test mail server that will display emails to the console. 

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

Cheers

Don

On 20 Dec 2013, at 6:57 am, Arnold Krille <arnold@arnoldarts.de> wrote:

Hi

On Thu, 19 Dec 2013 01:23:58 -0800 (PST) Michał Pasternak
<michal.dtz@gmail.com> wrote:

I would like to announce a GUI app, written in wxPython, that I
quickly assembled yesterday mainly using some code from StackOverflow
and Google.

The app is called wxMailServer and all it does is: it acts as a mail
server (it listens for traffic incoming at localhost port 25) and
when an e-mail is received, it displays this e-mail, highlighting URL
addresses in it and launching a web browser in case you click on any
of those addresses. 

An interesting idea. However, running a program that tries to open a
port <1024 results on security issues on modern machines. Only system
process are allowed (or should be allowed) to open ports there.
Luckily enough, if your software has an option to start with listening
on a different port, you can also set that port when telling django how
to send emails.

E-mail sending is getting harder and harder nowadays, with my VM
unable to send e-mail because of local antivirus, and if I disable
it, I get notices from Google about being on an IP that is not
allowed to send e-mails. So, anyway, it looks harder and harder. Why
do that, then? E-mail server running on localhost, displaying
incoming e-mails should be the best tool to test if your app
generates proper e-mails.

"Sending emails" for testing? There is this email-backend in django
that just displays the messages on the console. Ideal for manual
testing.
And for automated testing (the only way to make sure you really always
send emails with the wanted content) you just look at mailbox.outbox as
described in django testing docs.

Lastly there are several thousand valid reasons for mailservers not to
accept un-authenticated email delivery from dail-ups and dynamic
ranges. (These mails are largely called spam and are sent by botnets.)

Have fun,

Arnold

PS: If you really want your local django to send mails to the outside
via google, you can just do smtp-authentication with your valid google
credentials...