mini-mail-dev

A alternative take on a development / testing email server.

Features:

• Get started with a single command
• Simple UI
• Fast
• Can handle a vast amounts of emails

Run

Docker

docker run -it --rm -p 1080:1080 -p 1025:1025 ghcr.io/mjarkk/mini-mail-dev:latest

Docker build

git clone https://github.com/mjarkk/mini-mail-dev
cd mini-mail-dev
docker build -t mini-mail-dev .
docker run -it --rm -p 1080:1080 -p 1025:1025 mini-mail-dev

Go Install

(you might not have the latest version if you have installed it earlier)

go install github.com/mjarkk/mini-mail-dev@latest
mini-mail-dev

Git clone & Go build

git clone https://github.com/mjarkk/mini-mail-dev
cd mini-mail-dev
go build
./mini-mail-dev

Usage

mini-mail-dev [--flags]

Options:

name	Flag	Envourment variable	Default
Disable web	--disable-web	DISABLE_WEB	false
HTTP address	--http	HTTP_ADDR	0.0.0.0:1080
HTTP password	--http-pass	HTTP_PASS
HTTP username	--http-user	HTTP_USER
Max emails	--max-emails	MAX_EMAILS	200
SMTP address	--smtp	SMTP_ADDR	0.0.0.0:1025
SMTP domain	--smtp-domain	SMTP_DOMAIN	localhost
SMTP incoming password	--smtp-incoming-pass	SMTP_INCOMING_PASS
SMTP incoming username	--smtp-incoming-user	SMTP_INCOMING_USER

Note that authentication is only enabled if you provided the relevant envourment variables

Why

Something something reinventing the wheel :^)

But besides the fun of reinventing the wheel I do have some reasons for making this. I used maildev before this and I have some annoyances with it. It's an awesome project and has improved my life, but after using it for many years I have also noticed it's not without its flaws. So here is mini-mail-dev, my take on a mail development server and with fixes for my maildev problems.

Here are things this project aims to improve / do different compared to maildev:

• Attachments not hidden behind a button
• By default a fixed max amount of emails and when exceeded old emails are removed. (So you can safely deploy this on a server without much storage or cpu as the server does not have to store a shitload of emails when sending a shitload of emails on a staging server hehe)
• Different server side language. Mail dev has a tendency to break when running it on a server and sending more than the "average" amound of mails (my experience is at around 5.000 emails). By applying the above and using a language that is better suited for these kinds of things I can deploy this on every potato in the world.

Development:

Requirements:

• Golang v1.21 +
• Nodejs

Dev

go run .
# In another terminal tab run:
npm run dev

# For sending a few testing mails to the server run
go run test/test_email.go

The javascript files are hot module reloaded only when going to localhost:3001, the go files are not reloaded on changes made

Create and run a release build

# Build frontend
npm i
npm run build

# Build backend
go get
go build

Now you can start mini-mail-dev using

./mini-mail-dev