# A short app for showcasing Mailhog

## How to send email?

* use personal smtp (from FAI, gmail, work)
  - won't work because of the sender
  - I don't want to send with my personal account!
* use a transactional email provider
  - eg. Mailchimp, Sendinblue
  - good for production
  - but do we really need this for dev or testing environments?
* setup a full-blown smtp server
  - email is hard
  - who has time for this on a dev environment?
  - who has time for this on a test environment?
* setup a quik'n'dirty fake smtp server
  - python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025
  - better, but...
  - (show screenshot)
* setup a proper fake smtp server
  - a few names: Mailcatcher, Maildev, Mailhog
  - Mailhog: free software, easy to install (go, docker)
    + wget https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog/releases/download/v1.0.1/MailHog_linux_amd64
    + docker run -d -p 1025:1025 -p 8025:8025 mailhog/mailhog

## Other problems with sending mail

* in dev/testing env, we don't really want to send to the actual recipients
  - but we still want to craft the email for them

## Other benefits

* can test email displays as wanted
* can check attachments (receipt, invoice...)
* API -> can be used in unit tests / CI
* Test deliverability issues with Jim: MailHog's Chaos Monkey


## Links

* github
* https://mailtrap.io/blog/mailhog-explained/