Today I needed to send some test emails from my application and I searched around for a very simple SMTP server that can save outgoing emails to a folder instead of actually sending them. This is nice for debugging and testing email functionality in an application.
Unfortunately, it was very difficult to find something useful. In the end, I found a very simple script that did the trick. I forked it and added some command-line options so now I can easily run a simple SMTP server on my development computer in Linux, like this:
dummy_smtp.py -p 8081
In case you were wondering, this works really well with the Google App Engine mail API. Simply run the development server like this:
dev_appserver.py --smtp_host=localhost --smtp_port=8081
The source code for the server is right here:
https://github.com/dlebech/Dummy-SMTP