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Testing

Mailpit

Modern local SMTP catcher.

overview

Mailpit is a single-binary local SMTP server and web UI for capturing email during development and testing. It listens on the same 1025 (SMTP) and 8025 (HTTP) ports as MailHog, so it drops into existing setups, and adds faster HTML rendering, full-text search, an HTML and link compatibility check, a spam-score view, and a REST API. It is actively maintained.

for early-stage startups

At an early stage the deciding factors are what the free tier actually covers, what the first paid invoice looks like, and how much of a founding engineer's week the setup costs. Feature depth that only matters at a million sends a month is noise until it is not.

Against a waitlist, a launch announcement, onboarding email, and the first transactional sends, Mailpit covers developer experience, and does not cover scheduling, SDK breadth, and webhook coverage. Whether that gap matters depends on how central those are to the build.

  • Free tier: Free, MIT-licensed
  • Best published rate per 1,000: Tiers not published in comparable form
  • Starts at: Free
  • DX score: 9/10
  • Deliverability: Not applicable; capture-only.
  • Operating since: Not published
  • Scheduling: No
  • SDKs: None
  • Webhooks: No
deliverability

Not applicable; capture-only.

best for

Replacing MailHog in any local or CI email-capture setup.

not great for

Teams that need a shared cloud staging inbox rather than a local process per developer.

pros
  • Single Go binary or small Docker image with no runtime dependencies
  • Reuses MailHog's 1025 and 8025 ports, so most existing configs work unchanged
  • Views for rendered HTML, plain text, raw source, headers, and attachments
  • Built-in HTML-compatibility check, link check, and spam-score view
  • REST API and real-time inbox updates for automated tests
cons
  • Local development and staging only, not a production sender
  • No hosted or shared team-inbox mode

Features at a glance

API Yes
SMTP Yes
SDKs None
Webhooks No
Templates none
React Email No
Batch send No
Scheduled send No
Suppressions No
Multi-tenant No
Inbound parsing No
Event stream No
Idempotency keys No
Dedicated IP No

Appears in rankings

Compared with