For developers and administrators it is the quickest way to see exactly what Joomla sent, to whom, and whether it actually went out — invaluable when debugging a contact form, a registration email or a third party extension.

It is also a safe sandbox for staging and development sites: you decide whether caught mail is delivered as usual, logged and never delivered, or redirected to your own test address, so real customers never receive test emails.

The dashboard reports and statistics keep you on top of all email activity on your site, so unusual spikes — from spammers, attackers or a malfunctioning extension — show up quickly. It is just as useful for extensions that send mail regularly, such as newsletters or subscription systems: you can confirm at a glance that every message went out as intended.

Mail Catcher catches and logs the following information:

• Sent date
• Sent from email address + name
• Recipients
• Subject
• Email content (supports both text and HTML format)
• Attachments
• Sending status: failed or successful
• Interception status: delivered, logged only or redirected
• Mailer: PHP Mail, SMTP or Sendmail
• Referrer: see from where the email was sent (component, controller)
• IP address: the IP address of the user who triggered email sending

Main features:

• Three interception modes: log & send, log only, or redirect everything to a test address
• Automatic clean up: schedule a purge of caught mails by age or by count with Joomla's Task Scheduler
• Download any caught email as a .eml file and inspect its raw MIME headers
• Unread counter tile on the administrator dashboard
• Filters for date range, mailer, sending status and read/unread, plus bulk mark as read/unread
• Catches mail sent from the site, the administrator, the API and CLI commands
• Available in 23 languages, including right to left ones

Change log

Version 2.1.0

• New feature: interception modes — log & send, log only, or redirect all mail to a test address
• New feature: Task Scheduler plugin to purge caught mails automatically by age or by count
• New feature: download a caught email as .eml, plus a Headers tab in the message preview
• New feature: unread counter on the administrator dashboard
• New feature: filter by date range, mailer and read/unread, and mark mails read/unread in bulk
• New feature: 22 additional translations
• Improvement: faster mail list and dashboard on large logs
• Fix: attachments are now removed from disk when a mail is deleted
• Security: attachment downloads are restricted to the mail's own folder, and the HTML preview is sandboxed

Version 2.0.1

• Catch emails sent from CLI commands
• Fix language files not being loaded in some contexts

Version 2.0.0

• Support Joomla 6 natively

Version 1.3.0

• Fix an issue that prevented Mail Catcher from catching emails above a certain mime_body length
• Refactor the system plugin to use Joomla 5 MVC
• Subject: only encode when necessary

Version 1.2.1

• Fix Joomla 4.4 compatibility
• Support encoded email subjects

Version 1.2.0

• New feature: unread highlight for emails
• New feature: relative dates for the email sending date
• New feature: filter for failed emails
• Improve Joomla 4 support
• Fix message preview issue with Unicode characters
• Add logging of MIMEHeader & MIMEBody
• Fix charts incorrectly loaded by months
• Add support for attachments added via addStringAttachment