During the development of the dns-domain-expiration-checker script I needed a way to test SMTP mail delivery w/o relying on an actual mail exchanger. While reading through the smtplib and snmpd documentation I came across the SMTP debugging server. This nifty module allows you to run a local mail relay which will print the messages it receives to standard out. To enable it you can load the smtpd module and instruct it to run the DebuggingServer command on the IP and port passed as arguments:
$ python -m smtpd -c DebuggingServer -n localhost:8025
This will fire up a local mail server on localhost:8025 and each messaged received will be printed to STDOUT. If I run my DNS domain expiration script and point it to localhost:8025:
$ dns-domain-expiration-checker.py --domainname prefetch.net --email --expiredays 2000 --smtpserver localhost --smtpport 8025 --email
The debugging server prints the SMTP headers and body each time the script generates an e-mail:
$ python -m smtpd -c DebuggingServer -n localhost:8025
---------- MESSAGE FOLLOWS ----------
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============3200155514135298957=="
MIME-Version: 1.0
From: root
To: root
Subject: The DNS Domain prefetch.net is set to expire in 1041 days
X-Peer: 127.0.0.1
--===============3200155514135298957==
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Time to renew prefetch.net
--===============3200155514135298957==--
------------ END MESSAGE ------------
Super useful module for troubleshooting SMTP and e-mail communications!