How can I test an email-sending script that will send out to over 1,000 users?

I have a PHP web app that is going to send out about 1,000 emails. I would love to test the performance beforehand. Is there any kind of service that provides dummy email addresses to send to, for this kind of testing? I can't find anything that's not just a general bulk-email service. 开发者_StackOverflow中文版The key here is I just want dummy addresses to send to.

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If you have the ability to just purchase a domain name from a hosting service, I know at least 1&1 gives you like 2500 email addresses per domain so you could literally spam yourself to death and not worry about any other 3rd party. You can pick up a domain name for like

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When you say "test the performance", do you mean you want to know about your deliverability rates, or how your emails look?

Deliverability Rates

This is entirely dependent on your SMTP server and the reputation of the IP that it will be sending from along with your domain's SPF records and the content of your email. To maximize this, I would recommend using a marketing email service such as MailChimp or MadMimi.

Appearance of Emails

You could always just send yourself a test email to see how it looks. An alternative is to use a service like PostageApp that has a built in template designer that has both an easy email preview function and a test send email function.

(Full Disclosure: I am the Product Manager of PostageApp.)

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If you use "Post Hoc" you can send email to an unlimited number of email addresses. Post Hoc acts like an SMTP server, and receives the email messages that you are sending, but it does not forward them on anywhere. You do not need to set up any email inboxes ahead of time, so there is no problem if you have 1000 different unique email addresses. They do not need to be from a single domain -- you can use any email address you want. It stores the email messages received so that you can inspect them if necessary. You would run it locally so that there is no concern about network problems, and it is very low overhead since it does almost no processing of the email. This way, the performance measure will be mostly the sending side processing. Best of all, it is open source and freely available:

Find it on GitHub: GitHub for Post Hoc

Also see the blog post: PostHoc: Testing Apps that Send Email