• You may want to test the functionality of your SMTPmail application without actually sending out emails to your email list.
• You may want to perform a test run of your mass-mail application with live data.
• You may have slow performance with your application and want to determine whether the problem is with your scripts that form the emails or a bottleneck with your SMTP service that sends out the emails.

One of the ways to test your SMTPmail application without "spamming" your email list is to use the UseMSPickUpDir method of the SMTPmailer object. This method takes an argument that is the path to the pick-up directory of the server's SMTP service. When an email is dropped into this directory, the SMTP service will pick it up for processing.

   <%
   Dim mailer
   Set mailer = Server.CreateObject("SoftArtisans.SMTPMail")
    ...
   mailer.UseMSPickUpDir ("C:\Inetpub\mailroot\Pickup")
    ...
   %>

However, to test the email formation process of the SMTPmail client without having the emails actually sent out, you should set the path for the UseMSPickUpDir method to any other folder on your server.

   <% mailer.UseMSPickUpDir ("C:\MyTestingDirectory") %>

Since it will not be an active pick-up directory for your SMTP service, the emails will simply collect in that folder. You will be able to verify the production and content of the emails as well as the time necessary for the scripts to run.

For more information on how the UseMSPickUpDir method is used, please see the following page from our online documentation: http://support.softartisans.com/docs/SMTPmail/prog_ref_smtp_usemspickupdir.htm