This post started out as a question on StackOverflow.com (found here). I have moved over to Linux Mint 10 for all of my Ruby and Ruby on Rails application development. I have found this flavour of Linux to be the most pleasant for my purposes. But I ran into a bit of a problem when I first moved over form Windows.

Issue: On windows I had more than one option when it came to a dummy/fake SMTP/Mail trap which I could use to catch and examine the emails generated and sent out by the applications on which I was working. Extremely useful when testing account registration and email activation 🙂 But on Linux all I found were posts about setting up a full blown SMTP server and then connecting a mail client to it and pulling the emails locally. PUKE, GAG,VOMIT way too much work for me and I am really not interested in becoming a professional mail server administrator.

Solution: After millions of hours searching for a decent solution I ram across a Ruby Gem called MailTrap, oh my saviour, I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love this GEM, it makes my life so much easier.

[sudo] gem install mailtrap

Then don’t forget to setup your development environment file with the following entries

config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true
config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
:domain => “mydomain.net”,
:address => “localhost”,
:port => 2525,
}
config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { :host => ‘localhost:2525’ }

Then simply run the gem application in a terminal window and you will see each of the mail messages as they come in or you can view them in the log file that is created.

mailtrap run