Local Inbox

The Local Inbox is a built-in mail trap for developers. Point your application at Dispatch with a relay set to the Local provider, and every message is captured, not delivered - then inspect exactly what your app sent, right in the dashboard. No third-party service to wire up, no real inboxes spammed.

It’s ideal for local development and CI: verify templates, headers, recipients, and attachments before you ever send for real.

Set it up

1. Go to Relays and create a relay (or edit one) with the provider set to Local. Either make it the default relay, or add a routing rule that sends a test domain (e.g. *@test.local) to it.
2. Point your app at Dispatch over SMTP (25/587) or the HTTP API (8025), exactly as you would in production.
3. Send mail. Each message is written to the capture spool instead of going to a provider.

Inspect captured mail

Open Local Inbox in the dashboard to see every captured message with:

• Subject, From, and all recipients (To / Cc / Bcc)
• The rendered HTML body (shown in a sandboxed iframe) and the plain-text body
• Custom headers and tags
• Attachments - listed with type/size and downloadable

How it works

Captured messages are stored as .eml files in the spool’s captured/ directory and surfaced through the dashboard (and the read-only local API). They never reach a provider. Captured files are cleaned up by the retention policy (7 days by default), so the inbox doesn’t grow forever.

Tip

Switch a relay between Local and a real provider to flip the same routing between “capture for inspection” and “actually send” without changing your application.