What are email previews?
Whether you are sending emails as part of a marketing campaign or in order to welcome new customers to your product, it is very difficult to know exactly what your email will look like to everyone who will receive it.
Email previews are screenshots of your email taken on a wide array of email clients, using physical devices including PC, Mac, and mobile.
Who can generate previews
Designs and inboxes both belong to a project, and the project controls who can generate previews from them:
- From a design, you must be an Editor or Admin of the project the design belongs to, or an Account Administrator.
- From an email in an inbox, you need write access to that inbox. Every member of the project has it on inboxes that are not restricted. On a restricted inbox you need a Write or Admin role on the inbox, or you must be an Editor or Admin of its project.
A Viewer on a restricted inbox can open previews that other people have generated, but cannot generate new ones. See Permissions.
Test a design using standalone HTML
When creating or modifying the HTML content of an email, you can quickly test the appearance in various email clients by creating a "design" in Mailosaur.
The Designer shows the designs in the project you are working in. A new design belongs to that project, and stays there.
Follow these steps to create a design:
- Navigate to the Designer via the main menu.
- Click New Design to create a new design for your email.
- Name your design and click Create.
- Once in the design editor, paste the HTML you wish to test on the left-hand side of the screen.
- Select the Screenshots tab on the right and click Generate Screenshots.
- Select the email clients you wish to test and click Generate Screenshots again.
- Your screenshots will be ready to view in moments.
Using a test email address to check an email designed elsewhere
When the email you want to check already exists in another system, such as your own product or your email marketing solution, it is often easier to send a copy of the email to Mailosaur using a test email address.
To do this, follow these steps:
- Select Inboxes from the main menu, and select one of your existing inboxes.
- In the top-right of the inbox, you should see an option to copy an email address to your clipboard.
- Use this email address to send the email from whichever system has it (note: many email marketing solutions have an option to "send a test email").
- Once the email arrives in your inbox, click on it to open the email viewer.
- Select "Generate Email Previews" from the email viewer.
- Select the email clients you want to preview your email in and click Generate.
- Your screenshots will be ready to view in moments.
Creating an end-to-end test using the API
You can generate email previews within the Mailosaur Dashboard as described above. If you'd like to generate previews using our API, please contact our sales team to learn more.