The Google App Engine Mail API lets you easily send email from your applications. However, I found it difficult to test it locally when using the Development Web Server.

The documentation states that you can either use an existing SMTP provider or sendmail with the local server but the former solution didn't work for me with GMail or the SMTP server at my web host. And, from a quick Google search for sendmail, I got the impression that I should stay away from it.

In the end, I opted to use a simple Python-based SMTP server by Les Smithson to debug my mail calls locally.

It's very simple to use:
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