Email Testability

As we’ve covered elsewhere, if you have an email address associated with a BRAINBOX website, there are two main ways the email can get to you:

• Redirection
• Dedicated mailbox

Both have their pros and cons, but the latter gives us a much better opportunity for testing.

Redirection

There’s very little here we can test:

We can test that we can send an email addressed to you. If you are sent emails from a BRAINBOX website (via a contact form for example) we can test the sending process.

We can also test that the mailserver is able to redirect emails.

Once redirected, the email is completely out of our control.

We cannot test you email provider’s mailserver â€" unless we happen to have an account with the same provider â€" but we have no access to you particular mailbox. We can tell if the email bounces, but that’s about it.

The last step of the process is the collection of the email from the mailbox by your email client. In most cases, we won’t have access to your email client. So we have no idea how it might have been set up, what filters might be in place, what spam programs might be operating.

For these reasons, we provide redirects entirely without warranty. If you have problem with the receipt of emails, we will check that emails are being sent (in the case of website-generated emails) but that’s it.

There is, we think, a better way:

Dedicated mailbox

The use of dedicated mailbox on your website’s server increases the testability of the system. In particular, it allows for an end to end test: everything from the sending of an email to the receipt of the email by an email client.

The first change is that that we can test the mailserver and mailbox. We can know for sure whether a particular email has been received or not.

We still can’t test your email client, but we’re in a much better position to help you do so:

• Firstly, we can use our own email client to prove that a particular email can be retrieved.
• Secondly, we can confirm whether a particular email is present in the mailbox.