What a preview send really does

The Send a preview panel sits under the message on a saved campaign that has a list. It answers one question: what does this actually look like in an inbox, rendered with a real person’s data?

It is worth understanding what it is not. It is not a mockup, and it is not free.

It is real mail

A preview is a genuine email, sent through one of your connected mailboxes, at the moment you press the button. The panel says as much: “Sends real mail now, one per address. No undo.”

That has costs you should expect.

• It spends your daily budget. Each recipient costs one send against that mailbox’s rolling daily allowance, exactly like a campaign send. Previews and campaign sends are counted together.
• It is refused if the budget cannot cover it. ColdMerge names the mailbox and the number rather than sending part of it.
• It is rate limited. You get 20 previews per campaign and 50 across your organization, both counted over a rolling 24 hours rather than a calendar day. The receipt tells you how many are left on this campaign.
• A multi-address preview stops at the first rejection. Addresses sent before it keep their copy, the ones after it are never attempted, and the receipt names both halves. That is why resending delivers a second copy to the ones that already got it.

Suppression still applies with no exception. If an address is on your suppression list, a preview will not reach it.

It renders real data

The Render it for picker chooses somebody on the campaign’s list. Previewing against invented data tests the template rather than the data, so ColdMerge steps through people the launch would actually write to.

The Send it to box is where the preview lands. Leave it empty and it goes to the sending mailbox itself. Otherwise type up to 5 addresses, separated by commas. Keep those to your own test accounts. A typed address gets no working unsubscribe link.

The preview always uses the last saved message. If you have unsaved edits, the panel warns “Sends the last saved message. Save your edits first.”

While sending is unavailable

If your workspace cannot send, because it has no plan yet or its subscription has lapsed, previews still work, but only to an address you have already proved you own: the address on your account, once it is verified, and the sending mailbox’s own address. Leaving the Send it to box empty always works, since that goes to the mailbox. Any other address is refused, and the refusal names the ones you may use. Everything else about a preview is unchanged, including the two rate limits and the daily budget it spends.

It is not a campaign message

A preview belongs to no campaign’s recipient accounting. It is not counted as sent to anybody and it does not appear in the recipients table.

It carries an unsubscribe header and footer, but they point at one static “this was a preview” page. Clicking one can never suppress a real person.

The receipt

After a preview goes, you get up to three separate notices. They are kept apart on purpose, because they are three different facts and collapsing them is how one of them gets lost.

1. Where it went. “Preview sent to …” with the mailbox it came from, the time, how many sends came off that mailbox’s daily budget, and how many previews you have left on this campaign. This is written from the sends that actually succeeded, so it never claims mail that did not go.
2. What did not arrive. Any address that failed, with the reason. Resending delivers a second copy to the ones that already got it, so read this before pressing again.
3. Which tokens rendered empty. Any merge token that had nothing to put in for the person you rendered for. This is not an error, it is the answer you pressed the button for. Fix it by giving the token a fallback like {{company | your team}}, or by filling the field in on the contact.

The missing-field guard never blocks a preview. Everywhere else a token with no value and no fallback stops the send. Here it is reported instead, because seeing the gap is the whole point. See the merge token reference.

When the panel says something else

The panel is honest about states where a preview cannot happen.

• No list on the campaign yet: “Add a list and save to send a preview.”
• The list is empty, so there is nobody to render for.
• None of the campaign’s mailboxes can send right now, because they need reconnecting or are backed off from a quota. Reconnect one or pick a connected mailbox.
• The read failed, in which case you get a retry button.

Previewing is a desktop task

The preview panel lives inside the campaign editor, which is desktop only.