We built the email platform we always wanted to exist.

Back in 2011, one mistake changed everything. A staging environment accidentally sent 10,000 test emails to real customers. Password resets. Order confirmations. Test data. It was the kind of mistake you only want to make once.

So a few engineers at Railsware built themselves an escape hatch: a fake SMTP server that caught every outbound email before it could reach a real inbox. They called it Mailtrap.

Then came our first public demo at the Railsberry developer conference in 2012. After seeing Mailtrap in action, developers wanted to try it. Their teammates signed up next. Soon, teams we’d never met were using it too. What started as an internal tool became a public product, shaped by feedback from developers solving the same problems.

Fifteen years later, that same idea still guides everything we build: solve the problems we face ourselves, then turn those solutions into products every developer can use. What started as a testing tool has grown into a complete email platform for testing, sending, and managing email – trusted by PayPal, Atlassian, Adobe, Calendly, Yelp, GoPro, and more than 150,000 teams worldwide.

We’re still bootstrapped. Still engineer-led. Still building the email platform we always wished existed.