QA an Email Before a Big Send

An email 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. 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 six.

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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

In the app, click Add to chat on the email and ask:

“Run an accessibility audit on this email.”

The audit checks the rendered HTML against WCAG 2.1. It catches missing alt text, non-descriptive links, low contrast, tiny fonts, a missing language attribute, and empty headings. You get a 0 to 100 score and a list of issues, each tagged with the WCAG criterion it violates. Say yes when Brew offers to apply the fixes, then re-run the audit to confirm the new score. The same audit runs from any MCP-connected client via audit_email_accessibility, and 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. Check Where It Lands

A design can be flawless and still arrive in spam. An inbox placement test seeds your email to real mailboxes across providers. It reports where the email actually arrived: inbox, promotions, or spam. Run it from the API tab in the dashboard (Quality → Inbox Placement), or from an MCP-connected client via create_inbox_placement_test. It’s also available at POST /v1/emails/{emailId}/inbox-placement-tests. Results are not instant: the test comes back collecting, and you poll get_inbox_placement_results until it completes. It costs 10 credits and needs a verified sending domain, because the seed send goes out over your real sender. Subject line and preview text are the variables worth testing. Run the same design twice with different subjects and see which one gets filtered. Worth the credits before a launch. Skip it for routine sends to an engaged list.

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5. Validate the List

Everything so far has been about the email. This step is about who receives it. Invalid addresses bounce, and bounce rate is one of the two metrics that decide your sending reputation. A stale list does lasting damage on exactly the kind of send this recipe is for. Open the audience you’re about to send to. Click the three-dot menu in the top right (next to Download CSV) and choose Validate contacts. Each address comes back valid, risky, or invalid, and the verdict saves onto the contact. See Validate contacts. Validate the audience you’re sending to rather than your whole list. At 2 credits per address the difference adds up, and a list you validated stays validated.

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6. 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: