Hi there 👋

We are Mark and James, Oxford alumni and ex-Big 4 consultants, building developer tools based on our 40+ years of experience.

When we're not doing that, we build software for other organisations through our consultancy business, Abstract Leap.

We have a small team of amazing developers that help us with that and, in our non-work time, enjoy cycling and playing with our children; Mark, with two boys, who are slightly older than James' two girls! (Other than that, we're actually quite different)

We care passionately about building high quality products that solve our customers problems through elegant engineering and well thought out user experience.

Why Imitate Email?

Imitate Email was born out of a need to show test emails to our clients during user acceptance testing.

Email is an integral part of our clients systems; for one it is the way they deliver their products to their customers. So, not only are we, as developers, testing email flows all the time but so are our clients when they're reviewing changes.

We didn't want to make our clients install some 3rd party tool - we wanted to give them access to the emails inside the software that they're testing, making it feel like part of their system. That's why we built Imitate Email and, in particular, the embedded email viewer.

The Journey So Far

We launched the first version of Imitate Email in the summer of 2022, with a sandbox SMTP server and the embedded email viewer.

Since then, we've added a web app, IMAP/POP3 support for viewing in desktop email clients, support for integration testing alongside a bunch of tools to help with building emails.

We've just qualified for the "Grow" stage of the Microsoft for Startups program and are looking forward to adding to the 300+ users that have signed up so far!

Hopefully, you'll be one of them 😀