Building a Dockerized C# Email Tester: A Step-by-Step Guide 📧🐳👨‍💻

As developers, we often need to test email functionality in our applications. But how can we do that efficiently, especially when working with Docker containers? In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the process of creating a Dockerized C# Email Tester. We’ll cover everything from setting up the project to sending test emails—all within a Docker container.
Prerequisites

Before we dive in, make sure you have docker and docker-compose installed.

Getting Started

1. Clone the Repository

git clone https://github.com/jcianci12/docker-csharp-email-tester.git
cd docker-csharp-email-tester

2. Configure Email Settings

Open the appsettings.json file and update the following settings:

{
"SmtpSettings": {
"Host": "smtp.example.com",
"Port": 587,
"EnableSsl": true,
"Username": "your-smtp-username",
"Password": "your-smtp-password"
},
"EmailSettings": {
"ToAddress": "recipient@example.com",
"Subject": "Test Email",
"Body": "This is a test email from my Dockerized C# Email Tester."
}
}

3. Run the Docker Container

docker-compose up

4. Check the Console Output

If everything is configured correctly, you’ll see a message indicating that the email was sent successfully.

By Dockerizing our C# Email Tester, we can quickly spin up a container and prove that our docker environment can successfully send an email.

Some caveats to consider:

If you get an email sent confirmation, but you cant find the email, check your junk mail folder, and if you still cant find it, send an email from your target address back to your source address, then reply from the source address, make sure to send an actual sentence. I found that once I did this, my gmail started recieving my emails. Phew! 🤓