Email Testing Tip: Using One Email Account for Multiple Email Addresses

How to use email aliases to test multiple email accounts with only one account.

A repost of my daughter’s article with permission. I added a few notes.

During software testing, we often need to verify and read emails, such as ‘Account Activation’, ‘Password Reset’, ‘Invoice’, …, etc. If possible, for internal testing, I would test emails in Automated Test Scripts with a Fake SMTP server: MailCatcher, as it is quick, safe, and easy to verify (using automated scripts). However, sometimes, using a Fake SMTP server is not possible (requires dev support and setup).

This article shares a tip on how to use the same email account and receive emails from ‘multiple email addresses’.

A typical use case is the ‘User Sign up’ test case.

• A unique email address can only be used once for sign-up
• I don’t want to create a new email account every time we test this scenario.
  (‘User Sign up’ might be used often in test automation to create a unique user to prevent test data conflicts. Check out this article Case Study: User Change Password Automated Test)

A simple solution is adding a plus sign (+) and any word before the @ sign in one…