Fermata is an application that makes email testing simple and approachable by non-technical people. Configuring and testing systems that send mail can require a significant amount of time and effort. Fermata acts as a mail server, but instead of delivering mail to clients, it stores them for viewing in a web interface. This allows quick testing of off-the-shelf software (both Free/OpenSource and proprietary), and user acceptance and exploratory testing by business users.

Most of the methods traditionally used to test application mail-sending capabilities have serious drawbacks, especially in an enterprise environment:

Connect directly to a production mail server:

• Risks disrupting and confusing people not involved in testing with spurious mail

Reconfiguring tester's mail clients to a test mail server:

• Requires managing an SMTP server and POP/IMAP, accounts, etc.
• You now must manage local client mail configuration and troubleshooting.
• Enterprise-managed clients may not be able to alter their configuration.

Configuring procmail filters/whitelists to restrict recipients:

• Makes exploratory testing difficult: Who should receive mail from which addresses?

Use testing mail accounts:

• May restrict integration testing of other resources like LDAP servers.
• Requires coordination with manager of enterprise mail services.
• Difficult to manage with large/dynamic teams of people doing testing.

Basic functionality like receiving and displaying messages works.

Install sbt (Simple Build Tool), and run:

sbt update
sbt jetty

To create a WAR file that can be deployed to Tomcat, use:

sbt package

and move the resulting WAR file into your webapps directory.

An executable "standalone" WAR file is available as well. Simply double-click, or run

java -jar -Dport=8080 fermata-X.X-standalone.war

And fermata will start a webserver on port 8080, and an SMTP server on port 2500.

Fermata is distributed under the BSD-3 license, see the file "LICENSE" in the project root directory.

Dependencies include

• subethasmtp (Apache 2.0 license)
• Lift (Apache 2.0 license)
• Scala (Scala license (BSD-style))

Copyright (c) 2010 Greg Heartsfield.