QA an Email Before a Big Send

A campaign send is irreversible. Once it leaves, every typo, dead link, and broken Outlook layout is in thousands of inboxes with your name on it. The fix is a short routine you run every time, in the same order, so nothing depends on you remembering to check. This recipe is that routine. For a small internal send you might run only the first step. Before a launch announcement to your whole list, run all four.

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1. Send a Test to Yourself

Open the email and click Test in the toolbar to send it to your own address (add a teammate too). Then read it as a recipient, in a real inbox:

• Do the from name and address look right?
• Do the subject line and preview text read well together in the inbox list?
• Click every link and button. Watch for placeholder URLs left over from drafting.
• Check merge tags: does {{{firstName | there}}} render as a name, and does the fallback read naturally when it doesn’t?

A test send costs nothing and catches most problems. See Sending for the details.

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2. Preview It Across Real Inboxes

Your inbox is one client. Your audience reads in dozens. Open the Inboxes tab in the Preview panel and run a preview across real inboxes: Brew renders the design in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, iOS, and Yahoo and returns a screenshot per client. Read the results in this order:

• Outlook on Windows first. It uses its own rendering engine and is where layouts break most often.
• The dark-mode variants. Look for logos that vanish and text that loses contrast.
• The mobile clients. Confirm the layout stacks cleanly on a narrow screen.

Each preview run costs a fixed number of credits, charged only when at least one client renders.

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3. Run an Accessibility Audit (if You Use MCP)

This step has no button in the app, but if Brew is connected to your AI client, it’s one sentence in chat:

“Run an accessibility audit on the launch email.”

The agent calls audit_email_accessibility, which checks the rendered HTML against WCAG 2.1: missing alt text, non-descriptive links, low text contrast, tiny fonts, missing language attribute, empty headings. You get a 0 to 100 score and a list of issues, each tagged with the WCAG criterion it violates. Fix what it finds by asking for the edits in the same chat. The same audit is available at POST /v1/emails/{emailId}/accessibility-audit if you’d rather call the API directly. It costs 5 credits, charged only when the audit completes.

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4. Final Checks at the Send Screen

You’ve verified the email itself. The last mistakes happen at the send step:

• Audience. Is the recipient count what you expect? A count that’s way off usually means the wrong saved audience or a stale filter.
• Subject and preview text. These are set at send time, so a perfect design can still ship with a placeholder subject.
• Schedule. Confirm the time zone if you’re scheduling in advance.
• Footer. Marketing sends need a working unsubscribe link. Test emails often get skimmed past the footer, so check it deliberately once.

Then send it, and read the analytics the next day rather than refreshing them all evening.

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Need help?

Our team is ready to support you at every step of your journey with Brew. Choose the option that works best for you: