VaultSandbox – Test your real MailGun/SES/etc. integration
I've spent the last few months working on something I wish I'd had years ago. I kept running into the same issue: CI green, production mail broken. TLS handshake failures, DKIM alignment mismatches, SPF soft-fails ... the stuff that only surfaces when real mail servers are involved. Most test tools (Mailpit, MailHog) are catch-alls. They confirm "an email was sent" but don't validate the protocol. They also aren't designed for network-exposed environments: no auth, unprotected Web UI, easy to enumerate messages. VaultSandbox is my attempt at fixing that. It's a self-hosted SMTP gateway…
In plain words
VaultSandbox is a self-hosted SMTP gateway that validates email protocol standards like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and rDNS during testing. It's built for developers who need to catch mail delivery issues before production, allowing them to test against real email providers like SES and SendGrid without changing application code. Unlike generic catch-all tools, it validates actual protocol compliance and includes authentication and security features suitable for network-exposed environments. It offers client SDKs for Node, Python, Go, Java, and .NET, plus a Web UI and CLI.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
I've spent the last few months working on something I wish I'd had years ago. I kept running into the same issue: CI green, production mail broken. TLS handshake failures, DKIM alignment mismatches, SPF soft-fails ... the stuff that only surfaces when real mail servers are involved. Most test tools (Mailpit, MailHog) are catch-alls. They confirm "an email was sent" but don't validate the protocol. They also aren't designed for network-exposed environments: no auth, unprotected Web UI, easy to enumerate messages. VaultSandbox is my attempt at fixing that. It's a self-hosted SMTP gateway (AGPLv3) that validates SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and rDNS on every incoming message. You keep your production email provider (Postmark, SendGrid, SES) in tests and you just change the recipient domain. No mocking, no config changes. There are client SDKs (Node, Python, Go, Java, .NET), plus a Web UI and a CLI for manual testing. Some technical details: Deterministic Tests Instead of polling or sleep loops, the SDKs use Server-Sent Events (SSE) so test assertions trigger the moment the mail hits the gateway. Minimal infrastructure footprint Built with NestJS and Angular, with no external database dependency to keep the container footprint small and easier to reason about. Post-Quantum Encryption I use ML-KEM-768 for the encryption layer. Incoming mail is encrypted immediately using a client-generated public key and the plaintext is discarded. The server only ever stores encrypted message data and cannot decrypt it. I chose PQ because I wanted to build something I wouldn't have to revisit in five years. If it handles large PQ keys reliably, everything else is easy. Quick start: https://vaultsandbox.dev/getting-started/quickstart/ Site: https://vaultsandbox.com I'd love feedback, especially on whether AGPLv3 would be a blocker for something you'd self-host in dev.
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