How can I stop Drupal from sending e-mails of any kind?

Question

I have a dev, staging, and live server workflow set up on Pantheon. My site has a lot of rules that cause members to be e-mailed for various reasons. I sometimes need to work on these on my dev/staging sites but I've realized that, since they have the live data, sometimes users will receive additional or duplicate e-mails when I'm working on something.

Is there any easy way to turn off all e-mailing capability (preferably automatically to prevent me from forgetting) on a dev/staging server? Ideally, I'd like to disable e-mail via a custom module, since I already have steps in place for making sure a custom module is enabled on dev/staging.

Answer 1

As another, quicker, option, you can add the following lines to your site's settings.php file (if you have the Devel module installed, which you certainly should if this is a dev site).

$conf['mail_system'] = array(
  'default-system' => 'DevelMailLog',
);

That will replace the default mail system with Devel's development mail system, which writes emails to a file log rather than sending them to a recipient. By default the files are stored in temporary://devel-mails, but you can alter that by setting another variable, eg.

$conf['devel_debug_mail_directory'] = '/path/to/folder';

Answer 2

Just a note to add another module to the "There is a module for that" list :

Reroute email intercepts all outgoing emails from a Drupal site and reroutes them to a predefined configurable email address.

I agree that this functionnality can easily be implemented with a few lines of code, but using this module, you could continue to receive emails to a predefined adress, with details on the original recipient, nice functionnality imho.

Answer 3

Or you can use hook_mail_alter to redirect or prevent drupal mails:

/**
* Implements hook_mail_alter
*/
function yourmodule_mail_alter(&$message) {
  // set 'To' field to nothing, so Drupal won’t have any address
  $message['to'] = ''; 
}

Answer 4

https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules!system!system.api.php/function/hook_mail_alter/7

<?php
/**
 * Implements hook_mail_alter().
 */
function mymodule_mail_alter(&$message) {
  $message['send'] = FALSE; 
}

Answer 5

Drupal 8

For Drupal 8, you can turn on the Devel module mail handler through the configuration system.

With drush it would be:

drush -y pm-enable devel
drush -y config-set system.mail interface.default devel_mail_log

Answer 6

I usually use Reroute Email module for this case. It can reroute all email from dev to certain email. The email sent also specify where this email should be sent to.

Answer 7

I think that Mail Redirect module is perfect for you :) Another dirty way is install the SMTP module and set a wrong smtp ;)

Answer 8

This will work without devel and is safe in all three environments.

Add this in settings.php. Copy it and change the environment to test for Test.

// Stop email on dev.
if (isset($_SERVER['PANTHEON_ENVIRONMENT']) &&
  $_SERVER['PANTHEON_ENVIRONMENT'] === 'dev') {
  // @see MYMODULE_mail_alter().
  $conf['development_environment'] = TRUE;
}

Then in mymodule:

function MYMODULE_mail_alter(&$message) {
  if(variable_get('development_environment', FALSE)) {
    // First: Prevent the mail from being sent.
    $message['send'] = FALSE;

    // Next: Log the mail so it can be debugged if necessary
    watchdog('Development Env', 'The following email was not sent: !message', array('!message' => '<pre>' . print_r($message, TRUE) . '</pre>'));
  }
}

Credit for the mail alter idea goes to http://www.jaypan.com/tutorial/preventing-emails-being-sent-drupal-7-development-environment.

Answer 9

So you could put this in your settings.php or settings.local.php if you have specific ones for dev, staging & production.

if(module_exists('devel')) {
  // Use Devel's maillog
  $conf['mail_system'] = array( 
    'default-system' => 'DevelMailLog',
  );
  // To set custom path 
  // $conf['devel_debug_mail_directory'] = '/path/to/folder';
} 
elseif (module_exists('mail_redirect')) {
  // Enable email rerouting.
  $conf['reroute_email_enable'] = 1;
  // Space, comma, or semicolon-delimited list of email addresses to pass
  // through. Every destination email address which is not on this list will be  
  // rerouted to the first address on the list.
  $conf['reroute_email_address'] = "[email protected]";
  // Enable inserting a message into the email body when the mail is being
  // rerouted.
  $conf['reroute_email_enable_message'] = 1;
}

Answer 10

Here is the documentation page for this: https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/local-server-setup/managing-mail-handling-for-development-or-testing

Another way to can do this that I haven't seen mentioned yet here would be to put this on your settings.php file:

// Prevent sending emails, store it in Drupal within the state system.
// Use drush sget system.test_mail_collector or
// \Drupal::state()->get('system.test_mail_collector', []); to see emails sent.
// @see \Drupal\Core\Mail\Plugin\Mail\TestMailCollector
$config['system.mail']['interface']['default'] = 'test_mail_collector';

This way you work around having to depend on an third party module.

This is what core does to test mail functionality, which is pretty nice, have a look at \Drupal\Core\Test\AssertMailTrait if you're curious.

Answer 11

Assuming that you are using the Mailsystem module, just go to admin/config/system/mailsystem and select DevelMailLog.

Answer 12

Set-up your SMTP to localhost and install MailCatcher (GitHub) which catches any message sent to it to display in a web interface.

Installation

1. gem install mailcatcher
2. mailcatcher

3. Configure your sendmail_path in PHP to:

   sendmail_path = /usr/bin/env catchmail -f [email protected]
   

   or in Apache configuration:

   php_admin_value sendmail_path "/usr/bin/env catchmail -f [email protected]"
   

4. Go to http://localhost:1080/

5. Send mail through smtp://localhost:1025

---

In Drush you can do like:

php -d sendmail_path="$(which catchmail)" drush.php some-command

Answer 13

if you do not want to touch Drupal configs, setup MailHog on your server to catch all the e-mails coming out of your application.

Answer 14

Enable SMTP Authentication Support module and you can directly turn off your SMTP Mail Server at admin/config/system/smtp.