A Mailtrap alternative with no signup

Mailtrap's email-testing sandbox and Email Blackhole solve the same everyday problem: your app sends email, and you want to see it and test it without delivering anything to real people. They differ in how you start and how you pay.

The short version

	Email Blackhole	Mailtrap (email testing)
To start	open the page; settings appear at once	create an account
API key	none: the session secret is the credential	account API token
Free	every feature; mail lives 60 minutes in memory; 30 messages an hour; 2 MB per message	free plan: 50 test emails a month, 1 sandbox, 10 emails per sandbox (their pricing page, checked 2026-11-01)
Paid	$1.99 a month: permanent inbox, 30-day retention, 5,000 messages a month, 1 GB	from $14 a month billed yearly ($17 monthly) for 500 test emails and 1 sandbox (checked 2026-11-01)
Real internet mail to the inbox	yes: a public address that shows SPF, DKIM and DMARC results	check their documentation
Wait-for-email call for tests	yes, free for everyone	check their documentation
Sends email for production	no: receive-only, never delivers or relays	Mailtrap also sells sending

Prices and plans change; check their pricing page before you decide.

Why people choose Email Blackhole

No signup, no card to try it or to use it in a throwaway CI run. Nothing to remember to cancel.
No feature is locked behind a plan. The free tier has the API, the wait call, webhooks and previews; the paid plan only raises limits and keeps mail longer.
Cheap persistence. If a pipeline needs the same inbox every day, that is $1.99 a month.
Email HTML is shown safely: in a sandbox with scripts off and remote images blocked.

Why you might choose Mailtrap instead

You want a team workspace with several users and projects.
You also want one vendor for sending production email.
You need what Email Blackhole deliberately does not do: it is not a deliverability or spam-scoring tool, and it never sends.

Moving over

Change your app's SMTP settings to the ones shown in the sandbox (press Copy as .env) and replace the Mailtrap API calls in your tests with the wait call. See Playwright or Cypress for complete examples.