Using Mailsac for Shared QA Email Accounts

When building software-as-a-service, several pre-production environments are often in play.

Developers, product managers, and QA engineers work together to test software in the various environments.

But there’s confusion around which user accounts can be used in which environments. Which accounts have the right permissions for testing. And your test environments environments don’t map 1:1 with 3rd party services. It’s confusing to know if you tested the right thing.

Mailsac lets you create disposable email accounts within a private custom. Temp email addresses to share with the team. This results in less effort keeping testing environment accounts separate. It prevents user collisions with third party providers.

Common Environment Setup Example

A QA team may have a test environment called “UAT” and developers have a different test environment called “Staging.”

The infrastructure might map to URLs with different subdomains like:

  • uat.example.com – QA team
  • staging.example.com – Developers
  • app.example.com – Production (customers)

where each subdomain has a completely separate database with a users table.

However, our sample app uses a 3rd identity provider (such as Amazon Cognito, Forgerock, Auth0, etc). The identity provider only has two environments:

  • test-identity.example.com – All non-production usage (UAT, Staging)
  • identity.example.com – Production (customers)

Furthermore, our app uses Stripe, which also has only two environments:

  • Stripe Test Mode – All non-production usage (UAT, Staging)
  • Production Mode – Production (customers)

One can imagine a users database table with the following properties:

  • users.id int, primary
  • users.email text, unique
  • users.identity_provider_id text, unique, corresponds to the Identity Provider
  • users.stripe_customer_id text, unique, corresponds to the Stripe Customer ID

Such a setup is common. Problems begin brewing when using the same email address in multiple environments.

Password issues with shared email addresses

A QA person wants to test their app. They sign up with [email protected] in UAT. [email protected] was created by a friendly sysadmin at their company. It is a real email inbox. The company has to pay a few bucks per month for the inbox, and it isn’t easily accessible by anybody else. Where’s that password again? Oh you asked Dave from IT to reset the email password? Oh you mean the UAT app password was changed only? The new password should be in a spreadsheet..oops somebody reset it and didn’t update the password? It doesn’t look like I have access to the [email protected] inbox. Wait a second..the Dev team is also using it?

Identity Provider Clash, Stripe duplicate

UAT person uses [email protected] and creates the user account with the Identity Provider, linking the identity_provider_id to their user in UAT. They also link the Stripe customer.

idemailidentity_provider_idstripe_id
22[email protected]idp_q7e4cus_t6n
UAT users table

But then a developer in Staging attempts to perform the action but gets blocked by the identity provider, and duplicates the customer in Stripe with the same email address, making the tracking of financial transactions overly complicated. UAT and Stating also end up with a different user id.

idemailidentity_provider_idstripe_id
19[email protected]NULL (failed)cus_yb1
Staging users table

It is possible the same password is used for [email protected] with the identity provider, and both UAT and Development are able to login. But the identity_provider_id will need to be manually set to match both environments, and it will never match the users.id column.

Let’s add one more common layer: role based permissions.

Developer 1 sets up [email protected] to

These are just a few of the problems with using a limited number of shared credentials for testing software.

Using Mailsac for Test User Accounts

A software team and QA team can share the Mailsac Business account to add nearly unlimited email addresses, and apply special features to up to 50 private address across 5 custom domains (and more via addons). Mailsac allows any custom subdomain of *.msdc.co, it may not even be necessary to involve an IT department to configure DNS.

QA team sets up example-uat.msdc.co.

The QA team will create 10 private addresses with specific purposes such as a user they will configure in uat.example.com with elevated admin permissions:

Next the Dev team, can do something similar but with a different custom domain, and different private email addresses.

Setting up a bunch of private addresses is simple and included with any paid plan. It can help prevent test credential collisions.

Random Inboxes and API Keys

It is not even necessary to setup private addresses, as done above, to receive email.

With a custom domain, any Developer or QA person can send email to any address in the domain without needing to create it first. Then they can check the mail with a personal API key.

The Business Plan allows creating multiple custom API keys:

API Key management in Mailsac

To make a random address, generate a random string:

openssl rand -hex 4 yields de692e19 (for example)

and prefix it to your custom domain:

[email protected]

Assume Greg’s API key is: wv6OCCXE4svjxuv7sOsCBA (note: never share these!)

He can easily check the inbox using the following URL scheme:
https://mailsac.com/inbox/[email protected]?_mailsacKey=wv6OCCXE4svjxuv7sOsCBA

Or get messages as JSON:

curl --header 'Mailsac-Key: wv6OCCXE4svjxuv7sOsCBA' https://mailsac.com/api/[email protected]/messages

which returns an array of messages including any links to be clicked.

[{
  "_id": "m77238f-0",
  "inbox": "[email protected]",
  "subject": "Confirm your account or something",
  //.........
  "links": ["https://app.example.com/confirm-account/iOZifOYkLX5qFfEo"]
}]

Concluding remarks

We hope this guide provides an overview of how software teams are using Mailsac to simplify testing.

Thousands of enterprises and software project teams use Mailsac to test their environments and manage “known good” test accounts for their SaaS.

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(Resolved) Service degradation due to apparent attack

Beginning 2:36 AM US Pacific time, Mailsac internal monitoring indicated slowness due to an abnormally large amount of spam coming from China. By approximately 6:30 AM we identified all root causes and believe the issue is resolved.

Our service employs several methods of blocking, shaping, and throttling egregious traffic from unpaid users. This particular attack worked around these automatic mitigation efforts, in part because the attackers opened thousands of sockets and left them open a long time, exploiting a loophole in our SMTP inbound receiver code.

Here is a graph of our inbound message rate showing the attack compared to baseline.

Slack Webhook Integration with Private Email Addresses

Last year, we soft-launched a new forwarding feature on private addresses. You may have noticed – underneath the “Forwarding” section, there is now a Forward to Slack option. (Manage Addresses > Settings > Forwarding)

With only a little clicking, you can have inbound emails dumped into a Slack channel. It’s easy – no coding, and no servers, are necessary.

We built this feature because we use Slack internally, and had a custom webhook translator to send certain emails to a channel. After a little copy and paste, code massaging, and unit testing, we were able to get the feature into the platform.

Email → Slack Options

After inserting a valid Slack Webhook URL, we give you the option to enable the To and From address to display in the Slack message (Include To and From in the slack message checkbox).
Here’s the difference:

Screenshot from slack receiving an email from Mailsac
Disabled TO and FROM in Slack Message
Enabled FROM and TO in Slack Message from Email

Enabling TO and FROM is useful for support requests, shared email inboxes, or when you might have multiple inboxes pointed at the same channel.

Disabling TO and FROM is useful for receiving alerts or notifications from the same service. For example, if you send a notification about a new purchase on your website to a Slack channel, and it always comes from the same service email address, you don’t need it to take up space in the Slack message.

Email Images and Attachments to Slack

The email-to-Slack forwarding feature supports file attachments, including images. Images will be displayed inline.

We recommend archiving attachments outside Slack at this time. Attachments are subject to recycling. Also, attachments must be made public in order for Slack to accept the messages. So do not send any PII or sensitive information. This is another reason why we chose to recycle attachments.

The same Mailsac message size limits apply for Slack. If you are interested in bumping up the attachment sizes, make a feature request or contact support and include your account ID.

Debugging Forwarding

The mail activity log will show forwards, and reports failures posting to Slack with error messages. (Dashboard / Usage / Recent Mail Activity Log)

Debug logging on email webhooks to Slack. Response data is redacted.
On errors, you will see Slack’s response.

Feedback

As always, please post feedback and questions to the Mailsac Discussion Forum. We think the feature is useful as-is, but we are open to making changes to better meet our customers needs.

Read more about the email-to-Slack webhook on our docs site.

New Feature: Debug Mail Activity and Publishing

A new feature allows viewing recent activity across the account – inbound email messages, web socket publishing, webhooks, and Slack webhook posts.

From the dashboard, go to Usage & Analytics, then Recent Mail Activity Log.

The debug log shows all inbound, outbound, and publishing actions by 15 minute intervals. Business Plans and higher get access to at least 6 months of history. Free and Indie Plans can see the most recent 15 minutes.

We intend to continue improving this feature by including extended debugging information, response codes, bounces, and other useful information. Please share your experiences with us, and report any problems.

This is a good time to mention you can view have inbound and outbound message counts and bandwidth, up to 30 days currently visible.

This tool helps make it easier to understand how many messages your app is sending – whether it is a custom email app built atop Mailsac, or QA integration testing team.

API Response Fixes

The status code for reserving an address on the API was returning a 302 in some situations, while the documentation said it was a 200. This has been resolved. This endpoint for reserving an address will also return the address object.

When deleting a private address, the API used to return { "ok": true } with a 200 status code. Now the API will return a 200 a copy of the address object which was deleted.

Official API documentation