MailHog

The OG email testing tool that every tutorial still recommends — but hasn't been updated since 2020. MailHog captures SMTP traffic in development so you can inspect emails without actually sending them. Simple concept, simple tool, and it worked great for years.

The problem: it's abandoned. Mailpit is the direct drop-in replacement — same ports, compatible API, actively maintained, with full-text search and email tagging. MailCrab is a modern Rust-based alternative with a slick UI. For SaaS teams, Mailtrap offers a hosted version with a production path.

If you're starting a new project, skip MailHog entirely and use Mailpit. If you have MailHog in an existing docker-compose, Mailpit uses the same default ports (1025/8025) so migration is literally swapping the image name.

The catch: MailHog itself is dead software walking. 15K+ stars on GitHub give it false credibility — those stars are historical, not a signal of health. No security patches, no bug fixes, no new features. Using unmaintained software in your dev pipeline is a quiet risk you don't need to take.