Dealing with Email in Development with Mailcatcher and Mailtrap

Today’s Topic: Dealing withe scary issues of potentially emailing all your users from the development environment. Yikes!

Overview

We all have to send emails from our web apps, and that can get scary when you’ve got real data in your dev database. There’s always a little bit of terror that maybe, just maybe, you’re sending real emails and annoying your users. Today we discuss a few tools that help close this hole while also making development with email a little nicer.
Questions discussed:

• How can I deal with email in my local development environment? (Answer: Mailcatcher)
• How can I deal with email in the staging environment? (Answer: Mailtrap)
• One final note: You should be sanitizing your data too! Mailcatcher and Mailtrap are good backups, but proper sanitization is essential!

Subscribe!

If you’re not already a subscriber, make sure to add Design vs Dev to your podcast client. You can easily subscribe in either iTunes or Stitcher Radio.

• Subscribe in iTunes
• Subscribe in Stitcher Radio

References

• Mailcatcher – A super, duper “fake” SMTP server. What Micah gushes over for the entire podcast episode.
• Mailtrap – For when you can’t or don’t want to run Mailcatcher, or you want some fancier features. Email trapping as a service.
• Data Sanitization – A quick guide on sanitizing a dump from PostgreSQL. The concepts are the same for any SQL database.
• Mailtrap for WordPress – A simple guide to integrating Mailtrap with WordPress

Podcast: Play in new window | Download