Delivering All Email From Staging To A Group Email Address

All email from the staging environment of a Rails app can be intercepted and delivered to a group email address. This avoids accidentally delivering staging email to production customers and lets the product team see all the emails that are being sent to customers.

Configure

We’ll use recipient_interceptor.

Gemfile:

gem 'recipient_interceptor'

config/initializers/mail.rb:

if Rails.env.staging? || Rails.env.production?
  MAIL_SETTINGS = {
    address: 'smtp.sendgrid.net',
    authentication: :plain,
    domain: 'heroku.com',
    password: ENV['SENDGRID_PASSWORD'],
    port: '587',
    user_name: ENV['SENDGRID_USERNAME']
  }
end

config/environments/{staging,production}.rb:

require Rails.root.join('config/initializers/mail')

My::Application.configure do
  config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
  config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = MAIL_SETTINGS
end

Also in config/environments/staging.rb:

Mail.register_interceptor RecipientInterceptor.new(ENV['EMAIL_RECIPIENTS'])

Use the ENV['EMAIL_RECIPIENTS'] environment variable to update the list of email addresses that should receive staging emails. For example:

heroku config:add EMAIL_RECIPIENTS="staging@example.com" --remote staging

Gmail filter

Depending on the app, this may generate thousands of emails a day. Avoid spamming yourself by setting up a Gmail filter for emails sent to staging@example.com.