Localmail

For local people.

Localmail is an SMTP and IMAP server that stores 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 # emails with confirmation codes. It can also be used to test SMTP/IMAP client code.

Features:

• Fast and robust IMAP/SMTP implementations, including multipart messages and unicode support.
• Includes simple HTTP interface for reading messages, which is useful for checking html emails.
• Compatible with python's stdlib client, plus clients like mutt and thunderbird.
• Authentication is supported but completely ignored, all message go in single mailbox.
• Messages not persisted by default, and will be lost on shutdown. Optionally, you can log messages to disk in mbox format.

Missing features/TODO:

• SSL support

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

Running 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 in the foreground, like so.

twistd -n localmail

You can pass in arguments to control parameters.

twistd localmail --imap <port> --smtp <port> --http <port> --file localmail.mbox

You can have localmail use random ports if you like. The port numbers will be logged. TODO: enable writing random port numbers to a file.

twisted -n localmail --random

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, 8880, 'localmail.mbox')
)
thread.start()

...

localmail.shutdown_thread(thread)

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

If you want to use random ports, you can pass a callback that will have the ports the service is listening on.

import threading
import localmail

def report(smtp, imap, http):
    """do stuff with ports"""

thread = threading.Thread(
   target=localmail.run,
   args=(0, 0, 0, None, report)
)
thread.start()