MailHog VS Node RED

Mailhog

hey HN, I recently published an article going deep into email previewing (in Ruby on Rails, but I think it's relevant beyond Rails).

MailCatcher (https://github.com/sj26/mailcatcher) and MailHog (https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog) are super handy and easy to run locally. Both spin up an SMTP server which you can direct mail to, and give you a nice web interface to browse mail and preview it.

Happy to answer any question! thanks, harrison

https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog This is set up for our test environments. Worth looking into

Does it say it's being send on localhost or on production? How is it "saying" it's being sent. We just setup mailhog to test emails for local development.

They should definitely invest in a chaos monkey (like Jim https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog/blob/master/docs/JIM.md)

depends on the infrastructre setup, but if you're able to specify smtp server the backend will use you can you something like https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog or https://github.com/rnwood/smtp4dev to catch any sent email, regardless of email address and read it via the respective api. Both mailhog and smtp4dev have decent api documentation.

Good question.

I expect that we're moving into a phase of AIs talking to AIs, and initially it'll be wasteful (because it'll be mostly English), but eventually, they'll derive their own language and seamlessly upgrade protocols when they determine they're talking to an AI. No clue how that will come about or what that language will look like, but honestly, it's kind of exciting.

Really interesting to think about how they might handle context, as well. Even though we have much bigger context windows (and they'll only get larger), context management is still a resource-management issue, which we'll probably continue to refine, as well. Imagine different strategies for managing both what is brought into the context of each request, as well as what form it could take (level of detail, additional references or commentary on it, etc). Things could get really unreadable even in English, and still be very interpretable for an LLM.

W.r.t. the graph-oriented interfaces, are you thinking something like Node-RED [1]? I'm seeing more and more people mention having LLMs produce non-text or structured outputs, like JSON, UI, and other things. Easy to imagine an LLM that wires together various open-source platforms, on-demand. Something like Node-RED for pipelines/functions, some UI tools for visualization/interactivity, other platforms for messaging, etc...

[1] https://nodered.org/

I skipped to chapter 9 in the article ("Clogged"), and it looked like Pipes failed because it didn't have a large enough team or a well-defined mission. As a result they couldn't offer a super robust product that would lure in enterprise users. "You could not purchase some number of guaranteed-to-work Pipes calls per month" is the quote from the article.

The reason I think that interesting is because that's the model these days for everything from AI tokens to Monday.com seats. It makes me feel like Pipes was before its time.

That said I've been collecting different "business glue" products that are similar to Pipes. To me, like you say, they aren't as interesting, exciting and intuitive as Pipes was, but maybe it just takes a little more digging. I tried to focus on open source tools but some aren't.

- n8n io: https://n8n.io/integrations/mondaycom/

- Node-RED: https://nodered.org/ (just read about this one in this thread)

- trigger dev: trigger.dev

- automatisch.io: https://automatisch.io/docs/

- Activepieces: https://www.activepieces.com/docs/getting-started/introducti...

- Huginn: https://github.com/huginn/huginn

- budibase: https://budibase.com/

- windmill: https://www.windmill.dev/

- tooljet: https://www.tooljet.com/workflows

- Bracket: https://www.usebracket.com/pricing (just SalesForce <-> PostgreSQL)

- Zapier: zapier.com/

Anyway I hope some of these are fun!

Source: https://github.com/node-red/node-red

I believe Node-RED (https://nodered.org/) the way to go. It's just an NPM package to install and you can run it how ever you wish (even on Windows). It has a friendly and helpful community with even the main developers tirelessly answering even beginner level questions. In fact the community forum its THE friendliest forum I've ever been a member of by a large margin. Node-RED's development is supported by the JS Foundation and it's completely free and open source. It's widely used in the industrial automation industry and even integrated by some PLC manufacturers such as Siemens.

Does anyone know if their are plans to implement something like this (or if there are already custom nodes out there). I'd like to experiment with things like looping and incrementing values (like a for loop) for a Ksampler for example. It's only an example though, so I am not looking for a ksampler specific solution; just a generic way to have a variable (e.g. Seed value), run some nodes that use that value, increment the value, and then loop back to the beginning until some sort of condition is met. Node-Red (an event driven node based programming language) has this functionality so it could defintely work in a node based environment such as ComfyUI (see here).