Inspired by the Ruby based http://mailcatcher.me project, I wanted something more light weight and written in PHP.
This is the basic start of that project.
Use this tool as a simple replacement for sendmail when testing local PHP scripts that need to send mail.
Just edit your php.ini and point your sendmail_path to bin/smtpcatcher, eg;
sendmail_path = /path/to/bin/smtpcatcher
You could also edit this config option via a local .htaccess
php_value sendmail_path "/path/to/bin/smtpcatcher"
Viewing sent email is easy, issue:
./path/to/bin/smtpcatcher -s
Then visit http://localhost:8100 in your browser.
To check that smtpcatcher is working as expected and catching emails you can use it to send test emails:
./path/to/bin/smtpcatcher -t [email protected] "some test" "this is a test email"