Introduction

Suppose that you developed a service in your application that send mails to clients (confirmation, cancellation, alert, etc...) and you want to test it and view the layouts of theses mails? Most probably, you will use your enterprise mail server and your professional account as test account.
But wasting long time waiting to receive test mails? connection problems? want to test cc or bcc? your professional mail account is full of test mails? this plug-in can help, it launch a local instance of JES mail server for test use, no installation is needed, easy to configure and provide accounts management (you can add as many accounts as you want).

About the project and features

This project is an open source Eclipse plug-in, JES mail server (version 1.6.1) is included.

  • Eclipse Integration. Starting and stopping mail server from Eclipse.
  • Language independent. You can test your mails service written in any language (Java, PHP,...) under Eclipse.
  • Performance. It launch a local mail server : almost no time between sending and receiving mails.
  • Ease of use. No server installation and easy configuration.
  • Small footprint.

About JES

Java Email Server (JES) is a well known, open source, complete and production ready email server written in Java by Eric Daugherty.

Restrictions

This project focus on testing and development and because of this it has some restrictions, if you want to install a fully functional, enterprise level email server please read section 'About JES'.

Usage

Starting and stopping JES

The plug-in adds three buttons to Eclipse menu to start, stop and restart JES email server.

Changing email server ports

You can change the SMTP and POP3 ports numbers, we recommend that you should leave these numbers in their default values unless another application is using one of these ports.

Window>Preferences>Email Server Preferences



Notice that for the plug-in nature and security raisons, the only domain in use is 'localhost', you can't add domains! it's a project restriction and NOT a JES restriction.

Managing users

The plug-in give you the ability to add, edit and remove users accounts. The plug-in come with a default user :
name : test
password : test

Window>Preferences>Email Server Preferences>users



Notice that when you edit your account, you will find that the length of your password has changed, this because JES convert the plain text password to a hash when the file is first loaded by the server, you simply continue to use the password that you entred

Configuring mail client

Configure your mail client in the usual way, in the POP mail server setting you MUST put the mail address as user name.

Here is a configuration example with the default account in Mozilla Thunderbird :

Download

Date : 29 May, 2009
SourceForge project download page

Author

Nabil Dridi, Senior J2EE developer, Tunisia.

Email : nabil.dridi@gmail.com for any feedback and suggestions.

Tests

The project was tested under :
Windows :

  • Eclipse Europa
  • Eclipse Ganymede
  • Eclipse Ganymede SR 1
  • Eclipse Ganymede SR 2
Linux (Fedora Core 9)
  • Eclipse Europa
  • Eclipse Ganymede SR 2

Requirements

This plug-in requires at least Java 5 to run.