Development Tool of the Day: smtp4dev

I wanted to take a few minutes to talk up a cool little tool that I started using a few weeks ago and have since come to rely upon.

smtp4dev (http://smtp4dev.codeplex.com/) is a dummy smtp server that, instead of sending email messages, stores them in a list for easy viewing and inspection.  Before I started using this tool, any time I wanted to test email sending for an application I had to, first of all, sanitize all of my data to make sure I didn't accidentally send messages to people that shouldn't get them, and then make sure any messages I needed to inspect were sent to my email account.  I would have to wait for messages to arrive in my inbox and deal with all of the test messages getting mixed up with my regular mail.  It was a big hassle, in other words.

An added benefit for me is that, since I access my regular mail through Gmail, I am able to easily open up the messages in Windows Live Mail (also a free download) which seems to replicate the way the email displays in Outlook.  For highly styled messages this is very important, since Outlook is a very popular client that has quite a few display quirks.