Many custom applications require an email component, either for workflow, notification or error logging. During the development and testing phase, programmers need to be able to test whether or not the application will actually send the email. Instead of installing an actual SMTP server on Windows 7*, you can configure IIS 7 SMTP Email.
*Note: Windows 7 no longer supports the Microsoft SMTP service, so if you still want to install an SMTP server on Windows 7 you would have to install a third-party application.
Open IIS Manager and navigate to your web site.
Select SMTP E-mail and Open Feature
Enter an email address to define who the email will be coming from.
Scroll down in the same feature window and select “Store e-mail in pick-up directory” and browse to select the email drop location.
Click Apply in the Action pane and you are ready to go. The email messages for that specific application will be sent to the selected email pick-up directory.
Note: You don’t actually send an email to another computer and this reduces the risk of having to secure an actually SMTP server running on development machines.