Our company uses tools like glockapps.com, mail-tester.com and others to test marketing email for spam filtering and deliverability testing.
We have created marketing emails that we want to test with these tools before sending to clients to make sure they pass these tests.
The problem we run into is in order to use these tools for testing, they generate a temporary email address like 123abc@mail-tester.com and you need to send your email to this address in order for them to analyse them. In Hubspot, you can go to “actions” → “Send test email” on marketing emails. However, you can only send a test email to a verified email address. In other words, I can only send them to my own email address as I need to verify my email by receiving a link and clicking it to make sure I own this address. I obviously can not do that on behalf of mail-tester.com or glockapps.com.
I also can not simply create a customer contact in the CRM and hit “Email” and send it because the marketing emails do not seem to show up as an option to send individually here either, only templates show here.
I contacted support who told me I have 2 options:
1: send the email to myself and then forward it to the tester email addresses. This doesn’t work as my email server is going to add things to the code of the email such as my sending server and the path it took to get there which means the testing sites are now basing deliverability and spam filtering based on my email address and server, not the one Hubspot is sending it with.
2: Create a new customer contact in my CRM with the mail testing service as the customer’s email, then create an email segment with those testing apps as the recipients, then create a workflow to automatically send these emails to the testing apps. This is an absolute nightmare way of doing a test as I would need to update the email addresses each time I need to send and run a new test, update the workflow or segment if I need to change any details, etc.
I can not believe that there isn’t a simple “Send to:” option for a single marketing email to be sent without these over the top methods.
I’m not sure if anyone else has any suggestions or if Hubspot devs could look into this as an option. I shouldn’t have to verify the email address I am using to send a single email to someone and I really shouldn’t have to create an entire workflow to bypass this gatekeeping method.
Please help,
Paul
Hi @plavallee,
Welcome to the Community!
If you’re sending a ‘regular’ marketing email (not automated) then you could clone the email, then choose to send to an individual contact when viewing this selecting recipients like seen here Create and send marketing emails
I’d also like to tag in some of our Top Contributors to see if they have any tips and tricks on this!
Hi @danmoyle, @Anton, @SteveHTM -- Do you have any suggestions for @plavallee on simplifying this process?
Thanks!
Sam, Community Manager
Hi @Playwell-Paul ,
apart from the already mentioned solutions, I had another idea, that might make this process more practical / reusable:
You can create a small contact-based “Testing Workflow” specifically for this purpose.
Setup:
- Create a contact-based workflow with no enrollment trigger.
- Add a single action: “Send internal marketing email.” and select the E-Mail to test.
- In that action, add the email addresses from your testing tools
A few advantages of this approach:
- The recipients don’t need to be contacts and don’t need to be marketing contacts.
- You can quickly change the testing address each time you run a new test (just edit the action).
- To trigger the test, simply manually enroll any contact (for example a dedicated test contact).
- If you want to test another email, just edit the action and switch the marketing email.
Things to keep in mind:
Emails sent this way will count in the email performance metrics of the marketing email. If you want to avoid skewing the data, it can be helpful to clone the email before testing.
Also note that if the GDPR functionality is enabled, recipients of internal marketing emails may need to exist as HubSpot contacts with the appropriate subscription type.
Once set up, you can reuse this workflow every time you need to test deliverability, which makes the process much faster than creating new segments or workflows for each test.
Hope that helps!
Best regards
Colin
Thank you both for the replies and the suggestions! I’ll give the single workflow a try and see if it can be used repeatedly for testing as we need it.
Thanks again,
Paul
@Playwell-Paul are you using any of the native HubSpot testing tools? Also, are you testing workflows or single email sends? I think some of this may depend on those questions.
As a long-time HubSpot user, I think the idea is that they require any address used as a test recipient or from address to be verified or to belong to an existing user / connected sending domain as part of their anti‑abuse and security model; it’s not specifically designed around deliverability‑testing tools and ends up blocking temporary addresses.
For these temporary sending addresses, are they different every time? Because I think you could use HubSpot segments (lists) for this. It means creating the email and then a clone after sending it, but it’s a practical workaround.
- Export the seed list from GlockApps and import it as contacts in HubSpot, mapped to the Email property.
- Put those contacts in a static “Deliverability Testing - GlockApps” segment and reuse that list for all future tests.
- For each new marketing email, create a “Regular” email, select that seed list as the recipient, and click Send Now.
This still uses a segment, but after initial setup you don’t have to rebuild workflows; you just choose that list as the audience when you want to test. And for single email sends (email blasts), you can use that segment anytime.
Another piece of advice is to check the Product Ideas forum to see if a similar idea exists you can upvote and comment on with your use case, or create your own. Features and updates can come from those posts!