A few weeks ago I was working on a rather large system that was still quite the black box to me. I was trying to get it to run when I suddenly realized it had been sending out error reports for about 20 or 30 minutes, at a rate of a few per second. One of my co-workers received over a 1000 of these e-mails. That brought up the issue of how I would test without having the system send out all those mails. And just turning off the local SMTP server wasn't an option either. So I set about finding an alternative that would allow me to continue testing without having to worry about mails being sent out blindly. I found some solutions that required me to integrate assemblies into my .NET solution, but this was not practical at the time. Finally I found something that suited my requirements. The little program that came to the rescue is called DevNull. It runs independently of your system, and "catches" any mails that are sent via SMTP. It has the option of saving the e-mails on your hard drive so you can view them later. And that was perfect for what I needed. So if you need to test an application that send out e-mails without the mails actually going out, then DevNull is perfect for you.

Free Download: DevNull

Operating System: Independent

Size: 458 KB

Remember Remember The Milk? I spotted this little site a while back. It lets you keep a list of things to do or remember. It seemed like a good idea. Only one thing bothered me. To use this, I had to do one of two things.

1. Keep the website open the whole day, and check it now and again to remind myself of what I have to do. Somehow I find it impractical to keep extra websites open, and then I need to be reminded to check it throughout the day.

2. Open the website every time I want to check my to-do list. Then I need something to remind me to do this every so often.

Both of these methods didn't appeal to me, so I stuck to my previous methods of task management, which didn't always work that well anyway.

Until I found a Remember The Milk add-on for Gmail in Firefox. The add-on displays your to-do items right next to your e-mail inbox. And since I have Gmail open all day anyway, and I'm already used to checking my e-mail every 10-15 minutes, this is ideal. The list of tasks is nicely sorted by due date, and details of each task are displayed when your mouse hovers over it. You can even integrate RTM to the extent that when you star an e-mail, or tag it with a specific tag, a task gets automatically created. This task is also linked to the e-mail in question. This is great for reminders to follow up on a particular e-mail. Adding tasks manually is also a breeze. Instead of typing a title, then selecting a due date, and possibly filling out a whole bunch of other fields, you just type something like “Call John tomorrow”. The task is created with the title “Call John”, it's assigned the due date of tomorrow, and if you have John listed in your Gmail contacts, the task is even linked to him. So when tomorrow comes, and you want to call John, you can easily bring up John's phone number by clicking on a link within that task. And notes can be added to tasks as well. For this you are taken to RTM's site, but this doesn't bother me so much. It's quite easy and quick to do.

This add-on is for Firefox, and is only visible when you have Gmail open. Please note, that it will only work with the new Gmail UI. If you're still using the old one, it will not appear. You can download the add-on here.