Moving the Site to New Server but how do I test email on new server without actually Sending emails

[MrCaspan]

So if we are testing the site on a new server to 100% make sure it works before we transfer the live site to a new server how do you test email without enabling it and having things like daily digests being set out to users twice (one from live site and one from test site. How do others do this? Is there an option to test email settings so that emails dont actually go out but get logged?

[Wayne Luke]

In the AdminCP go to Maintenance -> Diagnostics -> Email Diagnostics.

Though you should disable email so the scheduled tasks don't send out emails. In the AdminCP go to Settings -> Options -> Email Settings.

[MrCaspan]

Just for future users i used a service call https://mailtrap.io/ I set my test forum to use their server settings and all email that gets sent gets sent to this service and was never sent out to the public. I was afraid that when testing on a dev server that daily digest emails or happy birthday emails would send out to the end users and they would get double. This allows me to test email settings and see what emails are being sent out from the server.might be nice to include this feature in future versions that emails are only logged and not actually sent out so that you can see what would have been sent but don.t actually send any.

In fact having a developer setting for vBulletin would be nice.. If you turn this setting on it would override the default settings to dev setting for stuff like email settings, log emails don't send them, paths and folder changes, MySQL database connection settings. This would be very useful when your dev environment does not exactly mirror your production server

[Wayne Luke]

You can test email on your server by going to Maintenance -> Diagnostics and using the Send Email Diagnostic. It asks for a single email address and will send a test email if successful or provide error codes when it fails.

You can set up the logging of emails in the AdminCP under Settings -> Options -> Error Handling and Logging. You can temporarily turn off Email Delivery under Settings -> Options -> Email Settings.

Since your developer environment should be using its own database, you can make changes to the settings as necessary to accommodate it. If you know a little PHP, you can edit your config.php to provide different connection values based on the hostname, IP Address, or script directory.

[MrCaspan]

NP i figured it all out, just wanted to give feedback!