I saw this today on djangosnippets and figured it’s useful enough for me to post! Sometimes when writing a webapp you need to debug the output of your e-mail sending. This can be quite hard as things have to, usually, go via an SMTP server. What you really want is a quick way to grab the output with all the headers that YOUR code is setting – you can, easily, with Python.
OSX/Unix/Linux
sudo /usr/lib/python2.5/smtpd.py \
-n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25
(obviously on Solaris/OpenSolaris you want to use pfexec instead of sudo!)
Windows
c:\python25\python.exe c:\python25\lib\smtpd.py \
-n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25
You then get an output in the terminal window you ran it in every time a message hits the server. Handy.
That’s insanely useful. I assume it can listen on other addresses, i.e. could sit there picking up mail from another host? Useful none the less
Extending the idea of sent mails debugging, quite a long time ago I wrote a little debugging script, which you can download at http://elfz.laacz.lv/fakemail.py — it’s much like your suggestion, only it acts as a POP3 server as well, so you can use your mail client to download sent messages and see how they came out. Maybe you could find it useful.