Here at Reachably, we are always sending emails! Invites, Mailers, and Transactional emails are being sent out constantly. That means that there’s a lot of coding like it’s 1999 going on… it also means we have to test our emails, a lot. Here are some great tools that I use when the task arises!
This site has a free tool that allows you to test Gmail, AOL, and Outlook. It tests for spam and disabled images for all three. Useful for preliminary testing. There are expanded paid plans as well.
We have a premium account at MailChimp, so we have access to their nifty tool called Inbox Inspection. I think it runs on Litmus and offers a wide range of options for email tests. We use this one the most, it’s pretty great.
Not necessarily a testing tool, but a huge time saver. Instead of writing all of the inline styles yourself (like I was doing before!), you can just write it in a style tag in your <head> and this tool will inline the CSS for you! Had great results with this.
When testing my emails early on, I like to use Thunderird to send out emails to my own accounts. They have this easy “insert HTML” button that lets me pop in my code and send it on it’s merry way.
The only paid testing we did as at Campaign Monitor, for $5 per test. They also use the Litmus API, which is great because this is pay per use and I don’t think Litmus offers that themselves.
