How to test AEM email notifications during development or QA

In this article, we explain how to use debug mode or a dummy SMTP server to test emails sent from AEM that use the CQ Mail Service.

AEM 6.0 - 6.3 (later versions may apply as well)

First review this documentation for how to configure the Mail Service in AEM.

Go to http://aem-host:port/system/console/configMgr/com.day.cq.mailer.DefaultMailService and log in as admin.

To log emails to stdout.log file, enable the Debug email checkbox in the Day CQ Mail Service OSGi configuration.

Now while doing testing and development you can see the emails that would have been sent logged in the crx-quickstart/logs/stdout.log file.

If you don't have a stdout.log or need to debug richtext / HTML emails, then you can use a Dummy SMTP server instead.

Download a dummy SMTP server such as Mail Catcher or FakeSMTP

Go to http://aem-host:port/system/console/configMgr/com.day.cq.mailer.DefaultMailService and log in as admin.

Configure the Mail Service to point to the fake SMTP server.

Environment