Documentation

MailFade is a thin HTTP layer in front of an SMTP catch-all. Send mail to any address at mailfade.dev; read it back with five endpoints. There is no SDK to learn and no dashboard to click through — the API key is the account.

Start with the quickstart for code in five minutes, or the API reference to read the contract first.

What it is for

• End-to-end tests of signup, login, and password-reset flows. Every test case gets a fresh inbox; there is nothing to clean up.
• Snapshot tests of transactional templates from a staging environment — assert on the rendered HTML, subject line, and templated values inside CI.
• Agent evaluation. Give a software agent an inbox; watch what it reads, what it replies to, what it ignores. Replay any message into a new harness.

What it is not for

• A permanent mailbox you read in a UI. Bodies are deleted on a short clock by design.
• Signing up to unrelated third-party services. Disposable domains like mailfade.dev are blocked by many signup forms specifically to keep scripted accounts out — including this one.

How it fits together

   any sender on        Cloudflare         Email Worker
   the public net  -->  Email Routing  -->  (inbound)
                                              |
                                              v
                            metadata  -->  D1 (SQLite at edge)
                            body+att  -->  R2 (object storage)
                                              |
                                              v
   test harness or     HTTP API          API Worker
   software agent  <-- (Hono on        <-- (api.mailfade.dev)
                       Workers)

Every component runs at the edge. No SMTP server to operate, no upstream provider to fail over from, no dashboard for you to learn.

Free tier and paid plans

The free tier exists so you can wire MailFade into a real test today without talking to anyone. It is not meant for production CI — paid keys come with real quotas, longer retention, attachments, and webhooks.

See pricing for the full table.