Prices and limits below are from Mailtrap’s pricing and Email Sandbox pages on 17 October 2026. Check them for current details.
At a glance
| Proxy Mail QA | Mailtrap Email Sandbox | |
|---|---|---|
| How mail gets in | Sent to a real address over the internet, by any app or service | Your app sends through Mailtrap’s SMTP server, which catches it |
| Built for | Testing sign-up and login emails by hand, in test suites and with AI agents | Checking the emails your own app sends, in development and staging |
| Free | The whole product under fair use, private addresses that last up to 30 days | 50 test emails a month, 1 sandbox holding 10 emails, 1 user, no sandbox email address |
| Paid | Team: $5 a month per organisation (unlimited seats), $45 a year, or $95 once | Basic $14 a month (500 emails, 3 users); Team $34 (5,000 emails, 5 users); Business $99; Enterprise $399 |
| Codes and links | Pulled out of each email and shown on the account’s row; returned on their own by the API and MCP server | Not pulled out: you read the message |
| Email checks | SPF, DKIM, DMARC, links to localhost or plain http, where links go, stated expiry, size, phone layout, expected text and language | HTML and CSS support across email clients, spam score, headers, device previews |
| Test accounts | Personas, saved passwords, notes, tags, an account pool for parallel tests, reports | Not the focus |
| For agents and CI | REST API, npm package, Python helper, GitHub Action and an MCP server, on the Free plan | API for reading messages |
Where Mailtrap is the better choice
- Checking your templates before anyone gets them. HTML and CSS checks across email clients, spam scores and device previews tell you how an email will look and land.
- Development without real recipients. Point your app’s SMTP at the sandbox and nothing it sends can reach a customer by mistake.
Where Proxy Mail QA is the better choice
- Hosted auth services. Supabase, Clerk, Auth0 and Firebase send sign-up and reset emails from their own servers. A real address receives them with no change to your app; a sandbox only sees them if you can reroute the sending.
- The whole path, not just your code. A real address catches what a sandbox can’t: an email provider still in sandbox mode, a missing domain record, a link that points to localhost on staging.
- Many test accounts. Create as many private addresses as you need, each with a persona, a saved password, notes and every email, so anyone on the project can pick an account up later.
- The code or link, ready. It’s on the account’s row the moment the email lands, and the API and MCP server return just that, so tests and agents don’t parse emails.