Every now and then I find exactly what I’m looking for.
The last couple of engagements that I’ve been involved in have had non-production SharePoint environments that do not allow SMTP relay out of that environment. So to test email notifications (e.g. alerts, messages sent by workflows, etc.), I either had to have a complete mail setup within the environment to verify receipt of email messages — or simply perform limited testing. Neither of these is a great solution.
And then I finally stumbled onto this:
http://www.dotnetcode.co.uk/dummysmtp.aspx
This command-line utility (source included) listens on the default SMTP port 25, accepts incoming connections, and writes the resulting message out to a file.
Here’s what it looks like running on the console:
And here’s the output:
(If you squint very hard, it looks exactly like Outlook.)
Many thanks to the author for writing this utility and for making it freely available.
