Email boot log at startup in Ubuntu with bootmail

I’ve been searching for a way to save the output of the console when my Linux system boots up because

1. I can’t spot errors fast enough at startup and
2. I don’t notice errors on headless (no monitor) servers.

This shows a list of useful Linux log files, and I believe messages printed to the console at startup is stored in /var/log/boot.log. Don’t bother with bootlogd as described here as there are issues related to it.

To get these messages sent to your whenever the system reboots, one can use bootmail:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:bootmail/ppa ## for ubuntu < 11.10
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bootmail ## enter in email address
sudo bootmail ## check

Make sure mail is set up for the root user.