Meet PostPilot

Anyone that's been in web development long enough is familiar with the struggles of testing email, since so many applications require the ability to send emails for one reason or another. Whether it be for authentication, notifications, or just about anything else, email is a crucial part of of the web as it has been for the past few decades.

The problem is that testing email sending is a pain, and for most developers it means setting up SendGrid, Mailgun, or enabling SMTP on their personal email account. Moreover, once you start actually sending emails you have to deal with them clogging up your inbox while you're testing.

Granted there are a ton of ways around this. Just to name a few:

1. Use your personal email account (Gmail, Fastmail, ProtonMail, etc.) and enable SMTP


2. Have a local mail server be part of your development environment, along with a frontend like
   


3. Go the tried and true route of setting up an email service like SendGrid, Mailgun, or Postmark

While these are all valid solutions which I've tried (other than setting up a local mail server), they all have their own drawbacks.

For example, using your personal email account is great for a quick and dirty solution, but it doesn't scale well when you're testing a large number of emails. Setting up a local mail server is a bit more involved, and while it does scale it adds another layer of complexity to your development environment. Using an email service is a good middle ground, but it adds another dependency to your project and can incur additional costs.

Enter PostPilot

For these reasons and more, I've been working on and Laravel Herd.

For those that aren't aware, the Herd developers , and if you want to help me with the ability to get Windows and macOS builds out you can always support me on , or Ko-Fi.