kyatchi Catch the mail!

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Kyatchi (キャッチ catch) is a light NodeJS port of Mailcatcher. Kyatchi is written on top of the super simple Sinatra-like web framework for NodeJS, ExpressJS. The server and client-side javascript is all written in Coffeescript.

Like Mailcatcher Kyatchi runs a super simple SMTP server which catches any message sent to it to display in a web interface. Run Kyatchi, set your favorite app to deliver to smtp://127.0.0.1:1025 instead of your default SMTP server, then check out http://127.0.0.1:1080 to see the mail that’s arrived so far.

Kyatchi also sends new messages to the web interface through WebSockets with failover support for ANY browser that doesn’t support Websockets. This is done through the power of the awesome and simple pub/sub library Faye.

Features

• Catches all mail and stores it for display.
• Shows HTML, Plain Text and Source version of messages, as applicable.
• Mail appears instantly on any browser.
• Growl notifications for Mac OS X and Gnome notifications with Libnotify.
• Runs as a daemon run in the background.
• Written super-simply in on top of ExpressJS via Coffeescript, very easy to change.

How

1. npm install kyatchi
2. npm start kyatchi
3. Go to http://127.0.0.1:1080
4. Send mail through smtp://127.0.0.1:1025

The source is simple and available on GitHub.

Rails

To set up your rails app, I recommend adding this to your environment/development.rb:

      
        config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
        config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = { :host => "localhost", :port => 1025 }
      
      

ANYTHING ELSE!

Doesn’t matter what programming language/framework you’re using. If it uses smtp to send messages, then Kyatchi will work for you!

Caveats

• Email download needs work.

TODO

• Fix Email download, currently line breaks aren’t being persisted
• Add support for Attachments
• Add ability to specify smtp and web interface ports through command line interface

Thanks

I was surprised how quickly I was able to get Kyatchi up and running. We definitely have some very powerful tools at our fingertips right now. A big thanks to all of the authors/contributors of the whole stack used in Kyatchi. I would also like to thank the following people:

• Samuel Cochran - Thanks for writing and open sourcing Mailcatcher. It was definitely the inspiration I needed. (Hope you don’t mind me borrowing your styling :) )
• Aria Stewart - Thanks for your awesome and simple SMTP library. And thanks for suggesting the name for this project :)
• Leejay (Liangjie Xia) - Thanks for helping me debug some of the smtp parsing
• Drew Tempelmeyer - Thanks for the awesome logo!

Donations

I started this project because I’ve been wanting to write something like this for a while, but I am doing this in my free time. If you are so inclined, buy me a cup of cofee, soda, or some nourishment by donating via Amazon Payments.