Mailpit - email testing for developers
Mailpit is a multi-platform email testing tool & API for developers.
It acts as both an SMTP server, and provides a web interface to view all captured emails.
Mailpit is inspired by MailHog, but much, much faster.
Features
- Runs entirely from a single binary, no installation required
- SMTP server (default
0.0.0.0:1025) - Web UI to view emails (formatted HTML, highlighted HTML source, text, headers, raw source and MIME attachments including image thumbnails)
- Mobile and tablet HTML preview toggle in desktop mode
- Advanced mail search (see wiki)
- Message tagging (see wiki)
- Real-time web UI updates using web sockets for new mail
- Optional browser notifications for new mail (HTTPS only)
- Configurable automatic email pruning (default keeps the most recent 500 emails)
- Email storage either in a temporary or persistent database (see wiki)
- Fast SMTP processing & storing - approximately 70-100 emails per second depending on CPU, network speed & email size, easily handling tens of thousands of emails
- SMTP relaying / message release - relay messages via a different SMTP server (see wiki)
- Optional SMTP with STARTTLS & SMTP authentication, including an "accept anything" mode (see wiki)
- Optional HTTPS for web UI (see wiki)
- Optional basic authentication for web UI (see wiki)
- A simple REST API (see docs)
- Multi-architecture Docker images
Installation
The Mailpit web UI listens by default on http://0.0.0.0:8025, and the SMTP port on 0.0.0.0:1025.
Mailpit runs as a single binary and can be installed in different ways:
Install via Brew (Mac)
Add the repository to your taps with brew tap axllent/apps, and then install Mailpit with brew install mailpit.
Install via bash script (Linux & Mac)
Linux & Mac users can install it directly to /usr/local/bin/mailpit with:
sudo bash < <(curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/axllent/mailpit/develop/install.sh)
Download static binary (Windows, Linux and Mac)
Static binaries can always be found on the releases. The mailpit binary can extracted and copied to your $PATH, or simply run as ./mailpit.
Docker
See Docker instructions.
Compile from source
To build Mailpit from source see building from source.
Configuring sendmail
There are several different options available:
You can use mailpit sendmail as your sendmail configuration in php.ini:
sendmail_path = /usr/local/bin/mailpit sendmail
If Mailpit is found on the same host as sendmail, you can symlink the Mailpit binary to sendmail, eg: ln -s /usr/local/bin/mailpit /usr/sbin/sendmail (only if Mailpit is running on default 1025 port).
You can use your default system sendmail binary to route directly to port 1025 (configurable) by calling /usr/sbin/sendmail -S localhost:1025.
You can build a Mailpit-specific sendmail binary from source (see building from source).
Why rewrite MailHog?
I had been using MailHog for a few years to intercept and test emails generated from several projects. MailHog has a number of performance issues, many of the frontend and Go modules are horribly out of date, and it is not actively developed.
Initially I tried to upgrade a fork of MailHog (both the UI as well as the HTTP server & API), but soon discovered that it is (with all due respect to its authors) poorly designed. It is in my opinion over-engineered (split over 9 separate projects), and performs very poorly when dealing with large amounts of emails or processing emails with an attachments (a single email with a 3MB attachment can take over a minute to ingest). Finally, the API transmits a lot of duplicate and unnecessary data on every browser request, and there is no HTTP compression.
In order to improve it I felt it needed to be completely rewritten, and so Mailpit was born.