Really you can't test email in your live environment locally. 90% of problems reported with Universal Email are due to the SMTP server configuration. The only way to test if your server is configured to send emails is to do it on the live server.
Probably the best technique is to upload your site to a subdirectory of your live server... something like testing/ and test the whole site there including email functionality. Testing emails locally is not a good indicator of how or if it will work on the live server and is really only effective when verifying the email body contents are correct.
If you have a windows server you can install the IIS SMTP server and use your localhost to send emails.
Did this help? Tips are appreciated...
