hey everyone,
quick question for folks building products with signup / auth flows (especially with otp or email verification)
how are you currently testing these flows end-to-end?
i’ve been running into a bunch of flaky issues while testing:
- emails arriving late (like 3–5s randomly)
- wrong otp getting picked when retries happen
- tests passing locally but failing in CI
mocking works for basic cases, but it doesn’t really catch real-world issues around delivery timing or parsing
recently i started trying a different approach — running tests against real email flows and tracking things like when the email arrives, otp extraction, delays etc. it made debugging a lot clearer, but i’m curious how others are handling this
are you guys:
- fully mocking in CI?
- using tools like mailosaur/mailtrap?
- or testing against real providers?
would love to hear what’s working (and what’s been painful)
if helpful, this is roughly what i’ve been experimenting with:
https://www.freecustom.email/api
curious to learn from others here