Test Emails vs Test Attachments

[Jeff_Smith3]

When I share email tests with a group, I often send the sample to myself and then attach that sample email to an internal email that can get passed around for approval. I recently got the following response from a co-worker:

It’s important to send actual emails rather than attachments because they function differently. Some things may be an issue in an actual email that you can’t see in an attachment, and vice versa. I’d recommend always sending the test emails, not test attachments.

I'd appreciate any thoughts or feedback from the Community on this either being the case or not being the case. With the groups of internals involved with each email being different most times, I'd prefer to keep it simple and send the sample to me each time. Thanks!

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Jeff,

I do know for sure that forwarding is not good, as the forwarded email may have many things that are modified on the forward action by your emailing client or server. But I thought as you that attachement were alright.

I suppose this is a matter of preference, but I I always send samples to a list of people (Marketo has a very nice feature that "remembers" that list from one time to the next one).

-Greg

[Jeff_Smith3]

Thank you for your thoughts on that! Much appreciated.

[SanfordWhiteman]

It’s important to send actual emails rather than attachments because they function differently. Some things may be an issue in an actual email that you can’t see in an attachment, and vice versa. I’d recommend always sending the test emails, not test attachments.

An EML/MSG attachment in standard SMTP/MIME format has exactly the same contents as the original email.

Nevertheless, there are major advantages to sending an email directly rather than attaching it. If you want to test preheaders and/or preview pane layout, that's only going to work if it's the main email. And if a mail client adds certain info to the headers (such as greenlighting DKIM-signed mail or prefixing the subject line when spam is suspected), those also will not be emulated if you send an attachment.

[Jeff_Smith3]

Thanks Sanford! That's really helpful info.

[Eileen_DeLeon]

I'm a big fan of sending test emails as attachments! Back in my Outlook days, this was incredibly easy, and it was also very simple to rename the attachment according to the A/B test or Dynamic segmentation version, so that when high level reviewers are chiming in on copy, layout, etc. they know exactly what version they're looking at. For instance, instead of "TEST (To: name@email.com) | This is the Subject Line" I would name them logically like "TEST Segment 1 | This is the Subject Line."

Now that I'm in a Gmail environment, I'm having a hard time finding easy ways to share test emails with non-Marketo users in my org. Does anyone have any tips for replicating the "send as attachment" experience in Gmail? I'd rather not send the email directly to my reviewers from Marketo, as I usually like to include some context for the first round of edits, which I would typically put in the body of the email with all the versions attached. Any best practices form other Gmail users?

[Laura_Horman]

We are running across the same issue. Did you ever find a resolve for this?