The problem

Every dev has been through this: you need to test a signup flow, password recovery or email notification and end up using your personal email. Or worse, your corporate one.

Services like Mailtrap and Mailhog solve part of the problem, but require configuring SMTP, DNS or spinning up Docker containers before sending the first test email.

And if you want to validate emails inside an E2E test, things get complicated. Manual polling, arbitrary timeouts, code that breaks on its own.

The solution

MockMail.dev solves this. It’s an open-source temporary email platform running on Oracle Cloud Free Tier. Free, no catches, no hidden paid plan.

You create an account, generate an API Key and in two minutes you’re already receiving test emails. You can use it through the dashboard or directly via the REST API. Webhooks notify you when a new message arrives, and everything is encrypted with automatic expiration.

You can use it through the dashboard or directly via the REST API.

How it works

1. Create your account (no credit card)
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2. Generate an API Key in the dashboard
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3. Create temporary email inboxes via API
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4. Send emails to those inboxes in your tests
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5. Check messages via API or receive via webhook

What you can do

Create temporary email inboxes in seconds (via API or dashboard)
Receive webhooks when a message arrives
Query received emails through the REST API (with ready-made examples in docs)
View and manage everything through the web dashboard
Up to 500 emails per day, enough for any test scenario
Encrypted data, inboxes expire automatically

Why is it free?

The infrastructure runs on Oracle Cloud Free Tier. There’s no server cost, so I don’t need to charge.

Stack

TypeScript / Node.js
REST API + Webhooks
Web dashboard
Encryption at rest
Oracle Cloud Free Tier