Try it in capture mode

Capture mode runs the whole engine on your own machine, with no IP address, DNS records or certificate authority. Every message is accepted, signed, scheduled and recorded exactly as it would be for real delivery, then written to a directory instead of being sent, and shown in a browser.

You need the nitromta binary on your path and a directory to work in. On macOS or Linux, brew install nitrosend/tap/nitromta installs it; on a server, see installation; or build it with cargo build --release.

1. Write an installation

nitromta setup --config config.toml --capture

This writes config.toml, the installation's keys, a certificate of its own for 127.0.0.1, ::1, localhost and your host name, and a capture directory, all beside the configuration. It listens on this host's own unprivileged ports: SMTP submission on 127.0.0.1:2587, the SES v2 API on https://127.0.0.1:4443, and health, metrics and the capture inspector on http://127.0.0.1:9090.

2. Start the engine

nitromta run --config config.toml

3. Give it an account, an identity and credentials

In another terminal, in the same directory:

nitromta admin --config config.toml <<'END'
{"op":"put_account","account":1}
{"op":"put_identity","account":1,"name":"example.test"}
{"op":"create_login","account":1,"user":"app"}
END
nitromta access-key create --config config.toml --account 1

The login is for SMTP clients: its password is printed once. The access key is for SES SDKs: its ID and secret are printed once too.

4. Send

With any SES v2 SDK, pointed at the engine and trusting its certificate:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<the access key's ID>
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<its secret>
export AWS_CA_BUNDLE=./tls.crt

import boto3

# Your SES code as it is, pointed at the engine: only the endpoint and the keys change.
ses = boto3.client("sesv2", endpoint_url="https://127.0.0.1:4443", region_name="us-east-1")
sent = ses.send_email(
    FromEmailAddress="app@example.test",
    Destination={"ToAddresses": ["someone@example.com"]},
    Content={"Simple": {"Subject": {"Data": "from the quickstart"}, "Body": {"Text": {"Data": "hello"}}}},
)
print(sent["MessageId"])

Or through SMTP, at 127.0.0.1:2587 with STARTTLS and the login, from any client that can trust ./tls.crt.

5. Look at what was captured

Open http://127.0.0.1:9090/capture. Each transaction is shown newest first, as the receiver would have been given it: its headers, its text, and its message's lifecycle. The quickstart's identity has no DKIM key, so its mail is unsigned; one given a key, as installation shows, is signed before it is captured. The capture directory keeps each one as two files: <name>.eml, the content exactly as it would have gone, and <name>.json, its envelope (the return path, the recipients and the deliveries).

nitromta queue --config config.toml and nitromta explain --config config.toml --message <id> show what the engine holds and why, as they do in production (see operations).

The test the_capture_quickstart_as_setup_prints_it in crates/engine/tests/sdk.rs follows these steps with the Python example above, read from this page, and checks that the README shows the same.