The problem
Handling outgoing emails in a web application can be hard, because it’s very easy things to get wrong and send unwanted test mails to real world customers while testing some functionality.
Ensuring sent emails are designed, parsed and formatted correctly is a painstaking problem, too.
… and the solution
Mailcatcher is a program you can use to test sending email. It gives you the ability to inspect sent emails and their headers. It is a simple SMTP server that can receive emails. It also gives you a nice web interface to preview the sent emails.
We’ll cover installing the dependencies for Mailcatcher. Then we’ll install and set it up for easy use in our development environment. This includes use with PHP. Finally, we will setup password protect subdomain for easier access using Nginx.