I have gotten some great feedback from the early adopters of Neptune and have begun development on a new version.

The most significant new feature is a POP3 interface so you can point Outlook or Outlook Express (or any POP3 Mail Client) at port 110 and see all the messages in Neptune. This will remove the need to open the trace.log file to view the contents of the processed messages. I noticed also while creating the POP3 interface that Outlook 2007 deviates from the SMTP standard by adding a space after ‘FROM:’ in the MAIL command and after the ‘TO:’ in the RCPT commands. Neptune was updated to handle this deviation.

The next idea is to allow Neptune to fail on purpose and return error codes so you can test your exception cases.

Please add comments with other suggestions for the next release.

Thanks for the support and continue to spread the word.

While working on a current project I found myself faced with testing code that sends email.  In the past I would end up with an inbox full of test messages or unhappy customers that wonder why they just received a flood of emails from my site.  I was also frustrated that there was no way to easily automate this testing.

Enter Neptune. Neptune is a SMTP Development Server targeted for use in automated testing. I simply asked the question, “what if I had a SMTP server that did not relay the message and allowed me to query for messages and their content”. I would be able to use a server of this type to act as my SMTP server during testing and write custom plug-ins, validation and extraction rules to communicate with the server.

The goals of Neptune were to facilitate automated testing and be easy to use. I did not want to have to install a service or understand everything there is to know about running a SMTP server. I simply want to start Neptune and run my test.

Full documentation on how to use Neptune is provided in the msi you can download here. NeptuneSetup.msi (1.27 mb)

If you find Neptune usefull feel free to Donate for future development.