Trap and test AWS SES emails locally (opens in new tab)

Hm, many MTAs do return a unique queue ID when they accept a message over SMTP. Does SES not implement that?

Why would the Message-ID (that you assign) not work for this purpose? Perhaps the SNS notification doesn't include the message-id?

Thanks for noting this, this is a pretty solid reason — I thought most people tried to correlate other fields on the incoming email but this also makes sense

There are several alternatives. Most of them, including mailcatcher, seem to be unmaintained.

Mailpit is an alternative that has regular updates: https://mailpit.axllent.org/

Pitching my own: https://github.com/mjl-/mox has a "mox localserve" subcommand that runs a mail server on localhost for testing, including a pedantic mode and special addresses that cause failure conditions you may want to test for. This is actually a full mail server (SMTP, IMAP and much more) and it comes with a webmail client. The "localserve" mode was just so easy to implement that I couldn't resist.

Yeah thanks for this, I’ve been using it for years! Recently switched to mailslurper:

https://github.com/mailslurper/mailslurper

That's a really great point. I was wondering the same thing as the comment root but this is enough for it to make sense. At the end of the day, having a wrapper email/notification class with an SMTP and moving to a specific SES implementation seems like it'll always be a safe dev path.

Fair enough, I didn't know SES simulator was only zero-affecting for stats and quotas.

However then surely this thing is just re-inventing the wheel that LocalStack already invented ?