Inbox Contracts for Scheduled Automation

Short summary

The article introduces 'inbox contracts' — a testing pattern where each scheduled automation run gets a unique run ID, a dedicated mailbox, and a set of assertions to verify the correct email was sent exactly once with the right content and links. The author provides concrete shell-script examples and a logging schema (run ID, workflow name, message count, subject, extracted host) that makes postmortems fast and unambiguous. The core discipline: treat email as a first-class artifact of the job, not a side effect, so failures leave clear evidence instead of forcing log archaeology.

• •Each scheduled run gets a unique run ID, isolated mailbox, and targeted assertions (message count, subject, link host, body phrase)
• •Log run ID, workflow name, recipient, message count, subject, extracted host, and provider message ID for fast incident review
• •Keep retention short and store evidence as small JSON artifacts beside job output for easy diffing between reruns

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