Email notifications
Email notifications are a type of triggered email, an email that’s sent in response to specific user action or other events. Common examples of these app-generated emails include account and security alerts, activation and welcome messages, activity notifications, and utilitarian functions like password resets.
However, without a good email design, the best copy will not be read by your audience. You need to create an email formatted for readability, use images to enhance your message, and ensure that your email copy is as easy to read as possible by implementing better email design principles.
Email providers
Many email providers are available for free today, and the most popular are Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, AOL, Zoho, Mail.Com, and ProtonMail.
Although it seems that every one of them works the same way and comes down to the same thing, it does not necessarily mean that your email design will look the same on each provider.
Since each provider can have its rendering engine, it is essential to adapt the mail for each email provider.
Outlook, for example, used the Word rendering engine until 2019, which works quite differently from all the others, so it is very important to validate the design of emails on older Outlook applications.
How to validate it?
There are hundreds of ways to preview your email today, and it is tough to try all of them and verify your email design manually.
The best case is always to verify the most used email clients, that are also relevant for your users/customers, but still, there is a lot of them to do that manually.
In that case, the best and easiest way to verify your email design is to use a dedicated application, allowing you to test your email template on various email providers and different devices: mobiles, tablets, desktop applications, and web applications.
One of the available options is the Email on Acid web application, allowing us to test our email templates on all types of devices and most used providers.
How to use the application?
Email on Acid offers various tools like Content Checks, Deliverability, and Email Previews.
For this case, we will use Email Previews to preview our email template on various email providers.
You can upload your email using different ways:
If you decide to Email your HTML, you will get precheck mail from the application to send your email example.
After your email is received, it will be visible on the Projects page, where you can use tools that Email on Acid offers on your template, in this case, Email Previews.
Email previews
With the Email previews feature, you can preview your mail on 90+ clients and devices, which will help you to adapt your email design for every client and device.
By testing email template this way, you will prevent potential ‘holes’ in the design that could only be visible to users you send email to, precisely on providers they are using.
Also, you can share a link to email previews to others in the team if needed:
Conclusion
Software testing involves testing all aspects of the application’s interactions with the user. One such interaction is email notifications which can be a burden for testing because there are many email clients. The best approach is to find out which email clients our users are using and then find a tool that allows bulk testing.
“Testing email template on various email providers” Tech Bite was brought to you by Danis Čavalić, Junior Test Engineer at Atlantbh.
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