How are you testing email workflows in your E2E tests?

Rushabh Shroff — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 06:01:46 +0000

I've spent the last few years helping engineering teams with test automation, and one thing I've noticed is that email workflows are still surprisingly difficult to test.

Most teams have mature E2E setups today:

Playwright or Cypress
CI/CD pipelines
Parallel execution
Cross-browser testing

But when it comes to flows like:

Email verification
OTP authentication
Password resets
Magic links
Team invitations

there's usually some custom solution involved.

I've seen teams:

Use shared inboxes
Poll Gmail or Outlook APIs
Run MailHog/Mailpit internally
Mock email delivery completely
Skip testing the email part of the journey

What's interesting is that these are often some of the most critical user flows in an application.

If a user can't verify their account or reset their password, the product is effectively broken.

So I'm curious:

*How does your team handle email workflows in E2E tests?
*
A few questions:

Do you test the actual email flow end-to-end?
Do you use a dedicated email testing tool or an internal solution?
What's the biggest pain point you face today?
If you use Playwright, how are you handling OTP and magic-link workflows?

Would love to hear how others are approaching this problem.

DEV Community: Rushabh Shroff

How are you testing email workflows in your E2E tests?