As testers looking to increase automated coverage, we often encounter parts of the user journey – such as when an email notification, SMS alert, or multi-factor authentication workflow is involved – that on the surface appear difficult or outright impossible to automate. This leads to reliance on manual testing, which can be time-consuming and prone to human error, affecting the speed of your testing process or likelihood of regression.
However, with the right tools, even complex test scenarios can be automated effectively, improving test coverage and accelerating release cycles. Let’s dive into some common challenges and how they can be tackled with automation.
Transactional emails or SMS alerts
If you’re responsible for testing a modern customer experience, for example a hotel booking system, the emails or SMS messages sent by that system are as critical to the user experience as the screens with which a user interacts.
Whilst it’s possible to pull together a solution reliant on a public email service like Gmail, or self-host and maintain an open-source solution. You’ve got better things to be spending your time on! Most now solve this by integrating a managed service like Mailosaur to access email testing functionality, and international phone numbers for SMS, to capture and perform assertions against every message a product sends.
Mailosaur facilitated easy email testing, streamlined QA automation … and provided crucial support for evergreen projects.” – Manager of Software Quality Engineering at Domino’s.
Authentication workflows
Whether you’re responsible for a fintech application, healthcare portal, or a secure ecommerce platform, you’ll almost certainly be responsible for securing access to key areas of your product. That means the introduction of anything from email verification on signup, password reset workflows, and the increasingly essential two-step verification processes.
Sure, if you’re a ‘one-man band’ you can use your own phone to set up 2FA/MFA at least, but not only does that not work for automation, it also falls apart as soon as you’re working at any kind of scale – whether that’s more QAs around you, or a product that supports sending SMS messages in more than one country.
Things have moved on, and there are now solutions that not only give businesses access to phone numbers internationally, but there are also solutions that can mimic apps like LastPass and Google Authenticator to test “auth app” functionality. Here’s a snippet showing how this is done using our platform:
// Get a one-time password (OTP) from an SMS
const sms = await mailosaur.messages.get(inboxId, {
sentTo: ‘123456789’ // phone number
});
console.log(sms.text.codes[0].value); // e.g. “654321”
// Get a one-time password (OTP) from a ‘security device’
const currentOtp = await mailosaur.devices.otp(sharedSecret);
console.log(currentOtp.code); // e.g. “123456” Email rendering bugs and blind spots
The way an email looks to your customer can differ wildly, depending on which email client they are using. While it might look perfect to you on Gmail or the latest edition of Outlook on Windows, there are a ton of email clients outside your organization.
With Mailosaur’s email preview functionality, you can instantly see how your email will look for any recipient, no matter what email client they use, so there are no nasty surprises.
Come and see us at EuroSTAR 2025!
We required a solution that could provide multiple servers, allow us to generate test email addresses, and support extensive email testing. Additionally, the ability to automate and perform high volumes of email testing daily was critical to our operations’’ – Sr. Director, Quality Engineering at Malwarebytes.
Automating traditionally difficult test scenarios is easier than you think, with the right tools, those “impossible” tests become straightforward and we’re here to show you how at EuroSTAR this June.
Stop by the Mailosaur stand for live demos, practical advice, and a chance to chat with our team about simplifying your toughest tests.
Author
Louise Buckmaster
Digital Marketing at Mailosaur, crafting content and resources for QA testers.
Mailosaur are exhibitors in this years’ EuroSTAR Conference EXPO. Join us in Edinburgh 3-6 June 2025.