localmail 0.1

Localmail

Localmail is SMTP and IMAP server that writes/reads all messages into a single in-memory mailbox. It is designed to be used to speed up running test suites on systems that send email, such as new account sign up emails with confirmation codes.

Authentication is supported but completely ignored, and all senders and receiver email addresses are treated the same. Messages are not persisted, and will be lost on shutdown.

Limitations

• logging is bit verbose

• no SSL support

• very simple tests

WARNING: not a real SMTP/IMAP server - not for production usage.

Install

Localmail depends on Twisted, tested with version 11.0.0 and up.

pip install Twisted

Run

There are multiple ways to run localmail

twistd localmail

This will run localmail in the background, SMTP on port 2025 and IMAP on 2143, It will log to a file twistd.log. Use the -n option if you want to run oin the foreground, like so.

twistd -n localmail

You can pass in arguments to control parameters.

twistd localmail --imap <port> --smtp <port> -l localmail.log

Alternatively, run via tac file:

twistd -y localmail.tac

Embedding

If you want to embed localmail in another non-twisted program, such as test runner, do the following.

import threading
import localmail

thread = threading.Thread(target=localmail.run, args=(2025, 2143))
thread.start()

...

localmail.shutdown_thread(thread)

This will run the twisted reactor in a separate thread, and shut it down on exit.

Testing

The test suite is very simple, it uses the python stdlib imaplib and smtplib modules as clients, rather than twisted IMAP/SMTP, so it’s more integration tests rather than unit tests

./test.sh