inbucket/inbucket

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2263 stars · 219 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Inbucket is a self-hosted disposable webmail (email testing) server that accepts messages for any address via built-in SMTP and exposes them through web, REST, and POP3 interfaces. It stores mail as flat files with no external database or dependencies, and is written in Go and Elm.

Use cases

• test outbound emails from a web app in integration tests
• self-hosted mailinator alternative behind a firewall
• capture emails in a staging environment without leaking to real users
• load test email sending without hitting the corporate mail server
• view email HTML rendering and attachments during development
• inspect SMTP message source and headers while debugging

When to choose

• you need to verify emails sent by your application during automated testing
• you want a zero-dependency, self-hosted catch-all mail server
• you need SMTP, POP3, web UI, and REST API in a single binary or Docker image

When to avoid

• you need to actually deliver email to real recipients
• you need a full production mail server with authentication and spam filtering
• you need persistent, secure long-term mailbox storage

Facets

service · maturity stable

email http-server testing email testing developer-tools self-hosted windows self-hosted go disposable-webmail smtp-server pop3 mail-testing integration-testing rest-api mailinator-alternative linux macos docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="inbucket/inbucket")