Mailtrap Email Testing

So you have a Development server but have crippled its email sending ability so you don't send out incorrect links/info/emails to your attendees, eh? Wouldn't it be nice to test the email sending from time-to-time when you are using a specific plugin, messing with templates, building workflows that generate emails, testing connections, etc? Wouldn't it be even nicer to do this with zero risk of rogue communications going out of your development environment, while still being able to email out to an actual recipient? Wouldn't it be EVEN COOLER if this was all available for the low low price of FREE!?!?

Well, look no further than https://mailtrap.io for this ability.

Mailtrap allows you to use them as an SMTP email Communication Transport, and then ANY EMAIL that your Rock instance sends out, regardless of destination/recipient address, is trapped in an online inbox for your viewing pleasure and it never gets to the end user. This allows complete viewing of the aspects of the email as well... such as the HTML view of the email, Source Code of the email, Text view of the email, RAW email Headers, Spam and Blacklist reports, seeing which HTML or CSS in your message isn't valid on which email clients (Desktop, mobile, web), and previewing what the email would scale to on various sized screens.

Did I mention this is all on the free plan? There ARE limits on the free plan... notably:

• 500 total emails per month
• 50 emails in the inbox in a First In First Out fashion... (oldest ones are deleted as new ones come in)
• 5MB email limit
• 5 emails sent per 10 seconds max

So this isn't ideal for testing massive bulk emails, but they DO offer paid plans that can accommodate this.

So how do we set this up? Simple! I'm starting from the point where I assume you've already disabled things in your development environment, like all "Admin Tools - Communications - Communication Transports", all scheduled jobs in the "Admin Tools - System Settings - Jobs Administration" area that send communications, etc... So our "Send Communications" job is deactivated for this (which is fine as it isn't needed for emails that are "send immediately" and is only used for those we send on a schedule. If you want to test things that run on a schedule, you may need to enable that task again. Just beware, if you do so and some other task spits out a bunch of emails... you may hit your monthly limit of emails on Mailtrap fairly quickly. With that, let's get started.

1) Go to https://mailtrap.io and click on Sign Up

2) Create an account with your email

3) Confirm the email they send you by clicking the links/info/emails

4) Log in and click on the inbox they created called "Demo Inbox"

5) Find the credentials you will need to put into Rock. Here we have the SMTP server "smtp.mailtrap.io" and your username and password for that inbox

6) Go to your testing Rock install and navigate to "Admin Tools - Communications - Communication Transports" and click on "SMTP"

7) Enter your credentials from step 5, ensure that Active is set to Yes and click Save (feel free to mess with the port and SSL, but for basic unencrypted email, port 25 and SSL off work fine)

8) Navigate to "Admin Tools - Communications - Communication Mediums" and pick "Email"

9) Set your "Transport Container" to "SMTP" as it is likely blank if you've disabled all previous email transports in the system.

10) Go to your profile and click your email address to test this out. Set up and send a system email to yourself...

11) Log into Mailtrap and check the inbox to see the email it snagged. You can also setup auto-forwarding in the inbox to send incoming items to a real outside email if you want to see how it'd look in your email client. Beyond this, there is a ton of info here to dig through. As stated before, you can now see the HTML view of the email, Source Code of the email, Text view of the email, RAW email Headers, Spam and Blacklist reports, seeing which HTML or CSS in your message isn't valid on which email clients (Desktop, mobile, web), and previewing what the email would scale to on various sized screens.

That's all folks! Enjoy your new free email tool. If you need higher capacity, multiple users, shared inboxes, etc... they do offer paid plans. Check out their site for pricing. (I am in no way affiliated with them.) Credit to @RickJohnson for finding and sharing MailTrap.io with our team!