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.