An alternative is to use a lightweight local smtp server focused on this development needs. So today I’ll show you how to use Neptune (There is another product with similar features, which I’ve never used, so feel free to explore it as an alternative to Neptune. It’s called SMTP4Dev and you can find it at smtp4dev.codeplex.com).
The latest Neptune version (downloadable at http://donovanbrown.com/post/Neptune-with-POP3.aspx) even supplies a POP port so that you can easily check the emails you sent, instead of only acknowledging that an email was successfully sent.
Neptune runs in the windows tray. With a right click on it’s icon you access a context menu which allows you to stop the smtp server and access a window showing further details as the smtp/pop ports and the number of email messages processed.
As mentioned earlier, you can easily set up an email account on your outlook (or another email client) to use the pop server supplied by neptune to take a look at the emails sent from your application. Most of the account details (as the username, password and email address) are dummy and make no difference for the pop server. You just have to specify that the mail server is 127.0.0.1.
If you’re interested in unit testing your emails, Neptune also supplies some extensibility mechanisms for that purpose.
