Introducing Papercut!
I am pleased to introduce a new utility I’ve been playing around with… Papercut.
Papercut is an SMTP tool designed for testing email functionality in a program. Ever want to test the email functionality of a program/site, but don’t want it to send an actual email? Maybe you have a bunch of test data, or it is a snapshot of data from a live site. Papercut is your answer.
Papercut implements an SMTP that is only capable of receiving messages, not sending them. It has no recipient policy or anything, just accepts whatever it gets and writes it out as an EML file. Then on top of the SMTP server, it has a GUI that allows you to view the messages it has received in either raw MIME format, plain text, or as rendered HTML.
This is something I run into on an almost daily basis. I might need to check something works, or verify some formatting, and Papercut makes it easy, with no hassle of pointing it to a live SMTP server and verifying my email addresses are correct. To be honest, I was surprised I couldn’t find a program like this already out there. When I came up empty, decided to write one for myself!
It also makes use of WPF, so should have a pretty small memory footprint on newer OSes (found XP/2003 use more memory than Vista/2008), and the SMTP server is asynchronous and uses the managed thread pool, so it doesn’t tie up a lot of resources and should also work well with high message volumes (though the list of messages will get full).
Head on over and get it now!
Damn, you’re good! This is very cool. Thanks!
Anonymous
30 Oct 08 at 8:16pm
Why didn’t anyone think of this before? Super simple and efficient, it’s already making my life easier – great job!
Anonymous
7 Nov 08 at 6:43am
I had this idea a few months ago, but my procrastination means you get the glory!
Anonymous
7 Nov 08 at 7:57am
Simple, efficient, cool and cute. Congratulations!
Anonymous
8 Nov 08 at 2:31am
nDumbster has been around since the .NET 1.1 days:
ndumbster.sourceforge.net/…/default.html
It didn’t come with any sort of GUI to view the messages. It doesn’t seem to work with the System.Net.Mail objects.
I wrote this class against the LumiSoft mail server that mimics much of what nDumbster was doing:
http://www.lumisoft.ee/…/default.aspx
Anonymous
10 Nov 08 at 6:27pm
[...] talked about the Papercut tool I’ve written before. I initially wrote it to scratch an itch I had with previewing and testing emails during the development [...]
Introducing Papercut Web Edition at In Valid Logic
24 Mar 10 at 5:58pm
Thanks, but the PaperCut link is falling (403)
Rodney
10 May 10 at 6:14am
Ohh, this post is super old. Its now on CodePlex at papercut.codeplex.com.
krobertson
14 May 10 at 9:35am