July 2, 2012

SMTP Server For Development Farm – smtp4dev

Developing for SMTP can be a time consuming hell. One can work out encoding issues the hard way – with a proper SMTP server installed – or skip all that and make it easy. Enter SMTP4Dev's, which emulates an SMTP server, and allows one to see what's being sent around in much easier way.
Scenario:
I am working for the alert me functionality for the list and List Items modification and deletion but due to some configuration problem in my development environment,
I did not receive e-mail in consistent manner
After some goggling I have found one very useful project in codeplex for testing local smtp functionality without any installation.
Smtp4dev.exe does not require any installation.
  • Double click and open smtp4dev.exe
  • Click on option button and go to server tab
  • Set domain name anything you like for example: local.abc.com
  • Click Ok.
Now Open your Central Administration
  • Go to System Settings à Configure outgoing e-mail settings
  • Provide that same name of your domain name in Outbound SMTP server
  • Provide anything with domain name as from address. For example: test@ local.abc.com
  • Provide anything with domain name as Reply-To address. For example: Reply@ local.abc.com
Note: Make sure that the domain name provided in smtp4dev and the domain name in from address and to address are same.
Next,
  • Open C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc
  • Open local file with administrator rights using any text reading software like notepad.
  • Enter entry like à 127.0.0.1 local.abc.com
    (Make sure, this name must be same as Domain name in smtp4dev.exe)
  • Save and close
Now whenever your share point server will send any mail, it is captured and displayed as shown in screenshots below.

This is a mail sent by share point which you can Inspect, in order to see the contents of the email sent, check the encoding, etc.:

If you want to get fancier, the proxy server allows for customizing the way it behaves:


If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.

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