u/justneardy

I built an MCP server for email workflows and connected it with Playwright MCP.

Now AI agents can create inboxes, read emails, extract OTPs/verification links, and continue the user journey without writing custom email handling code.

I built it after seeing many teams struggle with testing email verification, password reset, and OTP flows in their E2E tests.

Anyone interested in learning more about how this works?

As a Solutions Engineer at one of the largest testing platforms, I've spent the last few years helping teams build and scale their test automation.

I've seen teams run thousands of browser tests in parallel, build sophisticated CI/CD pipelines, and automate incredibly complex user journeys.

Yet one problem keeps showing up over and over again: Testing email workflows.

Something as basic as:

• Account verification
• OTP authentication
• Password resets
• Magic links
• User invitations

often becomes the weakest part of an otherwise mature E2E testing strategy.

The common workarounds seem to be:

• Skipping email validation entirely
• Mocking the email provider
• Sharing a single inbox across tests like Gmail and polling their API in a shared inbox
• Building custom smtp servers and maintaining them

What's interesting is that these flows are often among the most critical user journeys in the application, yet they're frequently the least tested.

After seeing this problem repeatedly across customers, I started digging into why testing email workflows is still so painful compared to testing APIs, databases, payments, or browsers.

I'm curious how everyone here approaches it.

How does your team test email-dependent workflows today?

Do you mock them, use tools like MailHog/Mailpit/Mailosaur/Mailinator, use a hosted service, or have an internal solution?

One thing that always bothered me when writing automation tests was email verification.

Signup flows, OTPs, password resets, magic links, transactional emails the actual user journey often depends on email, but most test suites either:

• Skip email validation entirely
• Mock the email service
• Use a shared inbox and hope tests don't collide
• Build a bunch of custom polling logic

I ended up building Trivumo to solve this for our own testing workflows.

The idea is simple:

• Create isolated inboxes
• Wait for incoming emails during tests
• Extract OTPs, links, subjects, HTML, text content
• Use it directly inside Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, or Appium
• No SMTP setup or email infrastructure to manage

I'm curious how everyone else handles email testing today.

Do you:

• Mock emails?
• Use MailHog/Mailpit?
• Use a service like Mailosaur or Mailtrap or Mailinator?
• Roll your own SMTP?

Would love to hear what's working (or not working) for your team.

If I showed you a dashboard right now that showed the health of every email your product sends delivery speed, rendering, bounce rates, broken flows broken down by environment and release would that tell you something you don’t already know?