Once you familiarize yourself with the basics of how Mailinator works, you can begin to tailor it for your specific use case.
Use Cases Deep Dive
Being aware of Mailinator’s capabilities is one thing, but understanding how teams utilise Mailinator to solve real email testing problems is another. Here are some of the most common workflows that software development teams are automating with Mailinator.
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) Testing
The Problem: Testing 2FA systems can be a challenge due to the extra step of receiving the verification code. Managing personal test email accounts, or having to use your personal phone number is tedious and doesn’t scale across hundreds of test accounts.
The Mailinator Solution: Teams can automate the entire flow with SMS, email, or even both. Paired with a UI automation tool, the script can enter a Mailinator email address for your team inbox during the sign up, then we can use the Mailinator API to fetch the email and extract the verification code, pass that back to the UI automation tool and complete the flow. This allows to confirm the flow works exactly how the end user would complete 2FA. An automated approach to 2FA will allow you to test all the scenarios in parallel such as expired codes and locked accounts.
Passwordless Authentication and Magic Link Testing
The Problem: Magic links and passwordless logins where users receive a one-time login link via email instead of having to remember complex passwords and enter them. This technique has grown in popularity for its security and user experience benefits. Testing these links can be done by pulling the unique link from the database but this doesn’t cover the entire flow for the end user, for that, we need to send and read an email.
The Mailinator Solution: Teams use Mailinator to automate this testing by combining it with a UI test automation tool and trigger the sending of a link. Then using the Mailinator API we can extract the link and click it, completing the flow. The same approach can also be used to automated negative magic links scenarios such as expired links, link reusability and ensuring early sent links expire if a new one is requested. Such testing is crucial to prevent security vulnerabilities. The exact same approach can also be used for magic links that relate to verifying an account, or confirming a transaction.
Password Reset Flow Validation
The Problem: Testing password reset functionality to ensure users can retain access to their accounts and use your products. Without this core functionality working customers accounts could be compromised
The Mailinator Solution: Teams can use Mailinator to verify that reset emails arrive promptly and contain the correct link, this can be done via the UI or automated via the API. Automating this testing allows the team to try more edge case scenarios such as expired links, link reuse and broken links. This testing can catch common bugs that could be exploited by bad actors.
User Registration and Onboarding Workflows
The Problem: Verifying emails are sent during account creation and product usage. It’s typical for Software as a Service (SaaS) products to send several emails, from welcome messages to detailed product instructions.
The Mailinator Solution: Combining Mailinator with a UI testing tool allows you to thoroughly test all these workflow rules. Mailinator allows your tests to register hundreds of users, all with unique email addresses with no address setup, enabling you to check these emails arrive within acceptable timeframes, click the links and validate that the user arrives on the right page and their system status is correct. With this approach you can also ensure that users are unable to reach parts of the system that require email verification of having completed onboarding.
Transactional Email Testing
The Problem: Verifying that our e-commerce sites, SaaS apps, banking applications and more are sending transactional emails. These are emails like order confirmation, shipping notifications, receipts, invoices, subscription anniversaries, payment failures, status updates and many more. It’s crucial these emails arrive promptly and contain the correct data.
The Mailinator Solution: Teams use Mailinators webhook functionality to automatically capture and forward transactional emails in real-time, allowing teams to validate the content of the email. When an email is received matching your automation Rules, Mailinator will convert the email to JSON and post it to your endpoint. That endpoint can then have test logic to check the emails content against the applications database for correctness. This approach reduces browser steps and allows the team to catch critical issues such as incorrect information, bad formatting and missing information.
Multi-Channel Communication Testing
The Problem: Customers demand personalisation and modern applications meet that by offering multiple communication channels, such as email, SMS and in-app messaging. Customers can configure their account to receive one channel, or a combination. We need to test this functionality and that customers’ preferences are respected.
The Mailinator Solution: Create a unified inbox, sharing functionality for email and SMS. With such an inbox we can test these permutations to ensure messages are only being sent in the customers configured channels. For example, if a customer only configured SMS communications we can trigger a scenario that causes a notification and confirm it only arrives in the inbox as an SMS and not as an email, or both.
Scheduled and Recurring Message Testing
The Problem: Applications often send scheduled emails like daily digests, weekly reports and abandoned cart reminders. This testing is time sensitive and requires a sophisticated approach. Often users rely on these emails.
The Mailinator Solution:Teams can manipulate their systems to trigger such emails on demand, or perhaps alter the system time to trick it into sending the emails. Then using Mailinators API we pull the emails and verify that contents, and prompt arrival in real time.
Load and Performance Testing
The Problem: It’s common in marketing to send thousands of emails in one go, and it’s crucial those emails arrive to generate sales. Teams require email infrastructure that can handle this load and won’t become the bottleneck.
The Mailinator Solution: Mailinator can handle huge parallel volumes, allowing teams to simulate these scenarios. Scenarios such as mass password resets are a breach, surge in user sign ups, or large scale transactional email during sale times. With Mailinator teams can configure performance tests to thousands of Mailinator inboxes with no email address setup, and verifying the arrival times are acceptable. Using personal email providers for this type of testing will often lead to accounts being locked and flagged for suspicious activity.
Localization and Internationalization Testing
The Problem: It’s common for enterprise companies to send communications in multiple languages and adhere to country specific formatting for things like dates. This functionality requires testing.
The Mailinator Solution: Teams can create inboxes with a name hinting to the language like fr-user-1@domain.com, then using an automation tool trigger an email to be sent in that language. A team member could then open that team inbox and manually check the language and formatting.