Inbucket is an email testing application; it will accept messages for any email address and make them available to view via a web interface. If you've ever used mailinator.com, you already have a good idea of what Inbucket does. The benefit of Inbucket is that it is an application instead of a hosted service; you may run it on your own private network, or even your desktop.

Inbucket allows web developers, software engineers and system administrators to quickly see the emailed output of their applications. No per-account setup is required! Mailboxes are created on the fly as mail is received for them, and no password is required to browse the content of the mailboxes.

Inbucket has built-in SMTP and POP3 servers which store incoming mail as flat files on disk – no external SMTP or database daemons required.

Inbucket was written in Go and Elm. It is open source software released under the MIT License.

Mail features

  • Receive and store E/SMTP messages destined for any address or domain
  • Purge messages after a configurable amount of time
  • Enforce a cap on the number of messages per mailbox by deleting older messages
  • Optional load test mode; no messages are ever written to disk
  • Configurable load test domain; messages addressed to it are never written to disk
  • Access mail via embedded POP3 server

Web-interface features

  • List messages in a mailbox
  • Displays text content of a particular message
  • Displays source of a message (headers + body text)
  • Displays HTML version of a message (in a new window)
  • List MIME attachments with buttons to display or download
  • Delete a message
  • Monitor - a real time display of received messages
  • RESTful: REST API Docs