Automating email verification feature of an application?

Question

I'm helping to automate an new web application, part of this application requires email verification. What are the industry standards for automating the black hole known as "email"? What I'm trying to do is automate this piece of functionality without having any dependency on third party applications, like outlook or gmail.

• Should these emails be stored in a database via the application and then retrieved?
• Should we have an email sniffer that make the emails available via text file or again in db?

FYI, we are using the webAii automation framework.

Answer 1

I have done a simple thing.

1. Setup a IMAP/POP3 mail server
2. Send the mail to server
3. Retrieve the mail from the server using code. (Java Mail API for example)
4. Do further actions.

I don't know about any industry standard. But this works for me.

Answer 2

I've used Mailosaur in the past to do the exact same thing, and plan to use this again. I'm hoping that in a few days I will have this implemented in my automation framework. There are other services as well that provide it.

Answer 3

As best as I can tell, you have two problems: you want to verify that the email is sent but you don't want to depend on an existing email provider; and you want to test what happens when an email's embedded link is clicked.

For the first problem, I would probably configure a test mode in the server in which it would write files to the file system or to a database. In the past, I have accomplished the latter by implementing a custom provider in the Java Mail API.

For the second problem, I would parse the email to extract the verification URL. (I assume you know how to simulate the click once you have the URL.)

Of course, this approach will not check whether the email is legible or understandable or whether the email layout is correct in Outlook or in any of the popular email readers like Gmail or Yahoo Mail, but you can always do that by hand.

Answer 4

Are you trying to test the actual email verification process itself, or is the verification just a necessary step to enable further testing of other features?

If the latter, you might consider it cheaper to provide a test-specific(*) method to simply set an email address as 'verified' and leave the testing of email verification itself to your manual testing. Especially considering you're likely to want to do email verification by hand anyway to check it actually delivers to 3rd party inboxes and looks right (to a human).

(*) Make sure you don't leave this method enabled in a production build unless suitably protected!

Answer 5

Disclaimer - I work for the company that made this.

You might find that a hosted service such as Mailosaur is helpful for this.

You can of course set up something like this yourself , but the benefit of someone else doing the hard work is obvious.

Answer 6

Use an inbound mail API service

For example, PostmarkApp have a clean inbound API and a generous free tier with usage based pricing (as of June 2016). I use them explicitly for testing transactional emails on my app. Trigger the action, then verify that the email has been received by postmark. The emails are sent via a different providers, but you could also send them with Postmark.