Websites involve email functions, such as sending registration information, password reminders, etc.
I try to routinely run functional tests of complete websites from outside the website, and need a way to receive these test emails from an httplib based test script.
Previously, I have used anonymous email services, where the email content can be retrieved seconds or minutes after sending it, with an http GET.
These systems seem fragile, though, and they involve screen scraping, which is itself fragile. Are there services that provide emails via an xml/json GETable interface?
Is there a fundamentally better way to approach this? There are new email web-services like postmarkapp.com and yakmail.com; but the former does not receive mail, and the latter requires significant advance preparation.
My test tools are used for verification testing of live production systems, so mocking is not a good option.