This gem allows you to globally override your mail delivery settings. It’s particularly helpful when you want to omit the delivery of email (e.g. in development/test environments) or alter the to/cc/bcc (e.g. in staging or demo environments) of all email generated from your application.

It is a “configure it and forget it” type gem that requires very little setup. It includes some very innocuous monkey patching of ActionMailer::Base to work its magic.

It currently solves five (3!) common problems in ruby web applications that use ActionMailer:

Peter described this common problem in his original plugin implementation as such:

• I have a production site with live data.

• I dump the live data and securely transfer it to another machine (rync -e ssh), and import it using a few rake tasks here: github.com/pboling/sir-du-bob

• On this separate machine (staging, or development) I run tests, and test various features which often send out email (registration/signup, order placement, etc.)

• I usually want the emails to get sent from these non-production environments so I can verify what they look like when sent, but I don’t ever want to risk them getting sent to addresses that are not mine.

Another very important use case for me is to transparently re-route email generated from a staging or QA server to an appropriate person. For example, it’s common for us to set up a staging server for a client to use to view our progress and test out new features. It’s important for any email that is generated from our web application be delivered to the client’s inbox so that they can review the content and ensure that it’s acceptable. Similarly, we set up QA instances for our own QA team and we use rails-caddy to allow each QA person to configure it specifically for them.

If you install this gem on a production server (which I don’t always do), you can load up script/console and override the to/cc/bcc on all emails for the duration of your console session. This allows you to poke and prod a live production instance, and route all email to your own inbox for inspection. The best part is that this can all be accomplished without changing a single line of your application code.

[sudo] gem install sanitize_email

Customize and add to an initializer:

SanitizeEmail::Config.configure do |config|
  config[:sanitized_recipients] = 'to@sanitize_email.org'
  config[:sanitized_bcc] =        'bcc@sanitize_email.org'
  config[:sanitized_cc] =         'cc@sanitize_email.org'
  config[:local_environment_proc] =   Proc.new { %w(development test).include?(Rails.env) }
  config[:use_actual_email_prepended_to_subject] = true   # or false
  config[:use_actual_email_as_sanitized_user_name] = true # or false
end

Keep in mind, this is ruby (and possibly rails), so you can add conditionals or utilize different environment.rb files to customize these settings on a per-environment basis.

But wait there’s more:

Let’s say you have a method in your model that you can call to test the signup email. You want to be able to test sending it to any user at any time… but you don’t want the user to ACTUALLY get the email, even in production. A dilemma, yes? Not anymore!

To override the environment based switch use force_sanitize, which is nil, and ignored by default. When set to true or false it will turn sanitization on or off:

SanitizeEmail::Config.configure do |config|
  config[:force_sanitize] = true
end

So here’s how you can use force_sanitize to override the override.

Even if you set:

ActionMailer::Base.local_environments = %w( development )

and are in the development environment, you can override the override anywhere in your code.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  def test_signup_email_me_only
    SanitizeEmail::Config.configure do |config|
      config[:force_sanitize] = true
    end
    UserMailer.deliver_signup_notification(self)
    UserMailer.force_sanitize = nil
  end

  def test_signup_email_user_only
    SanitizeEmail::Config.configure do |config|
      config[:force_sanitize] = false
    end
    UserMailer.deliver_signup_notification(self)
    UserMailer.force_sanitize = nil
  end

  # this third method would conditionally use the overridden recipients based on inclusion of current Rails environment in the local_environments configuration option.
  def test_signup_email_environment
    UserMailer.deliver_signup_notification(self)
  end
end

Load the console with ruby script/console and regardless of what environment you are in:

> User.find(4).test_signup_email_me_only

and the email will have it’s recipients, bcc, and cc overridden to be whatever you set the sanitized values to be. Then if you want to send it to the actual user, instead of yourself

> User.find(4).test_signup_email_user_only

Plugin using Git:

# Installation as plugin works too! (let me know if you find any bugs, as I don't ever run it this way.)
./script/plugin install git://github.com/pboling/sanitize_email.git

git submodule add git://github.com/pboling/sanitize_email.git vendor/plugins/sanitize_email

Peter Boling is the original author of the code, and current maintainer of both the rails 2 and rails 3 development tracks. John Trupiano did the initial gemification and some refactoring.

George Anderson’s work / improvements have been pulled in, along with several other contributors, which can be seen in the Network view on github. Thanks!

• Source Code

• Gem Release Announcement

• Peter’s Original Writeup

• Using sanitize_email to Preview HTML Emails Locally

Copyright © 2008-2012 Peter H. Boling of 9thBit LLC Copyright © 2009 John Trupiano of SmartLogic Solutions, LLC Released under the MIT license