Automate verification of emails being received

Question

One of the applications that I have to do an enhancement to soon has a number of emails that are sent from the application. To the point of verification, I need to see the delivery failure notifications. I've done some preliminary searching on how to do this, but, haven't managed to find anything that I could consider useful. The email client that would be used would be Outlook 2007 or 2010 on an exchange server.

Answer 1

Finally figured it out, with the exception of reportitems such as Undeliverables. Most of the current code is from snippets that I put together to make it work.

public void readOutlookTest()
        {
            Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application app = null;
            Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook._NameSpace ns = null;
            Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MailItem item = null;
            Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MAPIFolder inboxFolder = null;
            Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MAPIFolder subFolder = null;
            Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application application = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application();
            app = application;
            ns = application.Session;

            try
            {
                ns.Logon(null, null, false, false);
                inboxFolder = ns.GetDefaultFolder(Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderInbox);
                subFolder = inboxFolder.Folders["folder name that you want to look in"];
                Console.WriteLine("Folder Name: {0}, EntryId: {1}", subFolder.Name, subFolder.EntryID);
                Console.WriteLine("Num Items: {0}", subFolder.Items.Count.ToString());
                for (int i = 1; i <= subFolder.Items.Count; i++)
                {
                        if (subFolder.Items[i] is ReportItem)
                        {
                            try
                            {
                                Console.WriteLine("Item: {0} is a Report Item.  I don't know how to deal with this yet.", i.ToString());
                            }
                            catch
                            {
                                Console.WriteLine("problems");
                            }
                        }
                        else if (subFolder.Items[i] is MailItem)
                        {
                            item = (MailItem)subFolder.Items[i];
                            item = subFolder.Items[i];
                            Console.WriteLine("Item: {0}", i.ToString());
                            Assert.IsTrue(item.SenderName == "display name of sender");
                            Assert.IsTrue(item.Subject.Contains("test"));
                            Assert.IsTrue(item.Body.Contains("text you need to look for"));
                        }
                        else
                        {
                            Console.WriteLine("item " + i + " is not a mail or report item.  have no use for it");
                        }
                    }
            }
            catch (System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException ex)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
            }
            finally
            {
                ns = null;
                app = null;
                inboxFolder = null;
            }
        }

Answer 2

I think this is related to this question which suggests a SMTP pretend server:

Testing email generation

but I suspect this would need to be extended to 'know' about certain emails and be able to respond to doesnt@exist.com in the correct way.

Answer 3

You could use a test email account and access it using an IMAP/POP client?

What I do in my Django apps is I set the email backend to a file based one for testing. Emails are then not sent to the addresses but are stored in individual log files. I can then test the content of these files.

There are two similar but different scenarios here. One is testing email delivery (this is dependent on your provider) and the other is testing the content of email being sent from your application.