I want to start using the email-ext plugin more extensively but I am very deeply concerned with spamming e-mails to people I don't intend to send e-mails to.

I would like to use the various recipientProviders available but I would like to be able to experiment with them before actually starting to use them in any e-mails.

What would be most useful would be to be able to have them resolve into some kind of string that I could simply display in a Pipeline job. Something like:

println value_of([$class: 'DevelopersRecipientProvider'])

Actually even an option to this plugin to operate in "dry-run" mode where it logs the result of what it would do in a the step's output but not actually send any e-mails would suffice.

As an aside, do any of the existing recipientProviders represent the committer? I.e. would be the person ultimately responsible for every commit that goes on to a branch, no matter who the author is.

Nominally, the committer and author are usually the same person, but merge commits (i.e. merge from master to my branch to get my branch up to date with master) could conceivably make these different where the author of a merge commit is the authors of all of the commits that get merged into my branch, correct?  This kind of "unknown" is what really scares me about starting to use the recipientProviders without first being able to experiment with their values in a way that does not result in me unintentionally spamming.

TBH, I find the descriptions of what the various providers resolve to to be quite fuzzy – hence why I want to be able to experiment with them before spamming with them.