HOWTO Catch/Redirect all outgoing e-mails from webapp on Windows Server 2003

Question

As suggested by another member, I have split the original post into two. To see the original post, go to http://serverfault.com/questions/134595/howto-catch-redirect-all-outgoing-e-mails-on-win2k-and-redhat-enterprise.

For this question, please keep your answers specific to Windows Server 2003 only. Thanks for the help in advance.

Background: I am integrating two separate web application that are developed in ASP .NET and JSP/Struts. As such, they are hosted on two different server technologies, namely Win2K3 and Redhat Enterprise Server 5.5.

Problem: There is a copy of production data in my test environment with real e-mail addresses. I need to test the e-mail functionality of these applications, but I do not want them to send out actual e-mails. Is there a way to catch and redirect all outgoing e-mails?

Ideally, I would like to send all outgoing e-mails to another e-mail (i.e., test@test.com) so my testers can look at them.

Answer 1

You can setup fakemail or Dumbster, both fake SMTP servers: basically they just act like an SMTP server but instead of actually delivering the mail, they dump it in their respective folders (I think Dumbster actually creates an object/data structure you can iterate through in code, not sure though).

Haven't used Dumbster, but fakemail is great: it carries on a standard SMTP conversation, but drops your@test.email into a folder that you can then inspect the headers, message body, etc.

For your project, I'd setup either on one of your servers -- if you do it on your RedHat box, make sure iptables has an exception for port 25 so your 2003 box can use it.