Howto test email that's being send out? (local)

as email is an important part you probably like to test it and to see what and when email is being send out.


When you have a local version of Joomla (by using wampserver) then you can test very easy by installing a program like Smtp4dev . When you run smtp4dev it will run and will catch the email that's being send out locally.

for example:
- when you have Joomla running offline
- have the mailer plugin enabled
- you can create a new event
- see within smtp4dev the email that's being send
the program will try to view the email within your mail program. sometimes it will give an error but then you can retry and it will show the email.

Alternative:

Because I'm using xampp as my local web server I also use contained mail tool Mercury. After starting it (or configure as service) in xampp control panel you need to configure it. Some corner cases are:

• in MercuryS SMTP Server - Connection control I added 127.0.0.1 as allowed connection
• in Manage local users... I added a mailbox for e.g. user Hoffi (that's me, so please choose a different name! )
• and in Aliases... I maped all email adresses used by my Joomla sites to the mailbox (e.g. hoffi@localhost)
• finally you need to configure your mail client to get all the mails. In my case I created an IMAP account for hoffi@localhost with IMAP and SMTP server localhost, user name hoffi and password as choosen in Mercury. But you can also use POP3, Mercury supports both.

Now you get all emails sent by your site(s) to all users you configured an alias in Mercury where the TO field shows the original recipient so you know who would normally get this email. Together with JEM mailer's configuration possibilities and a lot of trest users you get a big adventure game - for free! :woohoo:

Please note: Because my machine has no connection to the real internet I can do such mapping without any problems. If your machine is connected to internet you should be more careful and e.g. only use and map internal email addresses (...@localhost). Also you should respect privacy and don't read anything originally written to other real persons - but that's a matter of course you already know.

Oh, one important thing I forgot (which is also important for Bluefox' way I think)
Otherwise PHP will not contact Mercury.

btw: That's not only for JEM3. It also works with JEM2 or - loosing a lot of fun - without JEM.