When you are building systems like my Keep on Posting or my DNSk9 that send emails there’s always the danger that you’ll accidentally fire emails from your development machine to real users. You really don’t want to do that because it’s annoying and extremely unprofessional.

It happened to me a couple of times. Thankfully, nothing serious. But I learned the lesson. That’s why in my user models now I have a safe_email method which I use instead of accessing email whenever I’m about to actually deliver a message.

The method safe_email ensures that nobody will receive a message unless I’m in production and at the same time it’s good for testing. Obviously most of the time in development and testing mode I don’t deliver emails at all, but sometimes, I make an exception:

def safe_email
  if Rails.env.production? || email.blank? # If the email is blank (or nil), let it be.
    email
  else
    "pupeno+#{email.gsub("@", "_AT_")}@pupeno.com"
  end
end