In our previous post, we reviewed Sendgrid, Mandrill, and Mailgun – the most popular email sending services. “Test your emails before actually sending them”: each of them repeats this mantra, as does anyone who deals with email development. But do these services offer enough options for quality email testing? Let’s have a closer look at the checkpoints and see if there is a need for a special testing service.
Sendgrid test
Sendgrid offers sandbox mode and sink email addresses for email developers.
- Test the API integration in the sandbox mode. In Sendgrid, it’s a mail_settings parameter, which helps validate email sending requests. Sandbox mode allows checking the parameters of your JSON payload. If any errors are found, it returns their detailed description. You can find more information and examples in Sendgrid documentation. It doesn’t affect any of the real sending parameters.
- Check the email sending speed. This option can be useful for preparing large bulk email campaigns. Sendgrid has a “black hole” domain @sink.sendgrid.net. It will accept all the messages and immediately remove them. If you have a dedicated IP address, this type of test won’t affect its warm-up. However, all emails sent to this domain will be counted as billable.
Mandrill test
The testing mode in Mandrill offers a more extensive list of features: test API, test stats, and webhooks testing.
- With the test API key, you will be able to verify your integration and explore its capabilities. As no actual email sending occurs, it affects neither your monthly limits nor your account reputation.
- In Mandrill’s test mode, you have access to your test stats. Also, you can view and check the email subject, sender and receiver email address as well as the message content.
- Another interesting feature is webhooks testing. Mandrill provides you with a list of specific email addresses. You can use them to send a message for testing such events as bounces, rejects, and spam complaints.
You can find out more about Mandrill and see the comparison of Mandrill and Mailtrap features here.
Read more about these options in the Mandrill knowledge base.
Mailgun test
Mailgun features a very simple test mode and an email verification tool.
- To launch the test mode, you should simply set the o:testmode parameter to true. It will help to test your integration as well. Note that Mailgun charges you for the messages sent in this mode.
- Email verification tool is a specific feature in Mailgun. It is useful for bulk email campaigns. The tool will check all email addresses in your list to identify invalid ones. It helps to decrease the hard bounce rate, which has a negative influence on your sending reputation. Note that email verification is a separate limit, not included in the email sending volume.
Email Testing Outcomes
A lot of email sending providers offer quite limited testing capabilities. More importantly, they hardly allow users to separate email sending from development and production environments. Instead, some of them just feature third-party apps, which might help you with testing.
So, if you’re looking for a platform you can test, send, and control emails with in one place and don’t want to pay for multiple services, we would recommend going with Mailtrap. It will serve as a reliable end-to-end sending solution for most developers, QAs, and managers.
Still, regardless of what tool(s)/service(s) you go for and what your testing workflows look like, don’t forget to cover the three main steps:
- Testing of sending functionality
- Testing of content
- Testing for spam
Only with these steps out of the way will you be able to avoid many of the common errors that occur in email sending.
Good luck and till next time!
Thank you for choosing this article! Read Mailtrap blog to discover more about different email testing tools!