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Enjoy the new decade – take care of our world.

Most of us enjoy getting a link to something entertaining once in a while. In the early days of the World Wide Web, we send each other funny pictures via emails – today, we share our favorite videos via Twitter, Facebook and other social media. Most of these are so called “user-generated content” – that is; videos made by you and me for our own amusement and to get some feedback from other people. Many videos are – to put it nicely – mediocre, but the ones that spread and go viral are usually really good. Not because they necessarily feature great talent or professionalism, but simply because they are so damn entertaining.

For some reason – and I am sure people with a bit more insight into the human psyche than me can tell you exactly why – videos where people do something really stupid, disgusting, dangerous or daring are amongst the most popular. But what reward do the people who makes these videos get for their hard work? A lot of views and comments on Youtube? That’s nice, sure, but couldn’t we get something even better if the makers actually earned some money on entertaining the rest of us?

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People care about emails. They don’t like to be bothered with emails they find unimportant, especially not if they are sent by mistake, have the wrong content or looks weird.

Many of the applications we build send out a lot of emails, and for some, it is a critical part of the system. Lokalebasen is such an application, and the people behind wanted to monitor all outgoing mail, whether generated by a page request, a cron job, an administrator or anything else.

I built a clever little monkey-patch for the Ruby on Rails ActionMailer that makes sure that all outgoing emails has a certain email address put on BCC. This is not visible to the recipient, but it allows you to keep an archive of all outgoing mail, which is certainly useful – especially for support and bug-tracking.

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