I used to do quite a lot of technical presentations for some products like Metastorm BPM, Radical and Report+.  What I found though during this time is that preparation is always everything.

One thing that always was a problem is demonstrating how a mail is sent from a certain application and showing that the mail has been received at a clients’ mailbox.

What I’ve done for my development environment is I install my own lightweight POP server on my machine, with a one-click start up with a few mailboxes and have a lightweight mail client to read the mail (when developing I use other clients than Outlook,Outlook Express or Thunderbird).

How I currently setup my development server to accommodate SMTP and POP:

1. Install Mercury (with POP3)
2. Create a hosts file entry for a “phantom” domain like mydomain.com,mail.mydomain.com,smtp.mydomain.com,pop.mydomain.com etc.
3. Start up Mercury(on-demand, not as service)
4. Setup a couple of mailboxes,so now your POP mailboxes are setup
5. Install POPCORN (lightweight mail reader), just love using this as it does not take a lot of resources, especially whilst developing. (does not support HTML that good, but support RAW header etc. support)
6. Configure Popcorn with multiple mailboxes in step 4.

I like using this kind of setup as you are not dependent on any internet connection or a connection to a server at any point, thus even when on the road you can work on those automated email systems that you’ve been working on so long.

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