Check the email that arrived, not the draft you designed
By the time a campaign reaches an inbox, most sending platforms have rewritten its links
through a click-tracking domain, appended their own parameters and often rehosted images.
The draft no longer describes what recipients get. SendProofs inspects the delivered test
email — the .eml file you save from your own inbox — because that is the
artifact that contains the final links.
What is inspected
One saved test email file with the .eml extension, uploaded from your
machine. It works with an email saved from Gmail, Outlook on the web or Apple Mail —
exact saving steps are in the guides for
Gmail,
Outlook on the web and
Apple Mail.
The draft, the template and the editor preview all show the URLs you typed. The delivered copy shows the URLs your recipients will click: the tracking-rewritten links with every appended parameter. Those are the ones worth checking before send.
How the checker handles it
From the HTML part, SendProofs extracts every a[href] link and every remote
img[src] image; plain-text emails fall back to link extraction from the text.
Only http and https URLs qualify. Each URL is normalized and
deduplicated, with occurrence counts kept — a link that appears five times is checked once
and reported with its count. A duplicate upload of the same submission is idempotent: it
is recognized and not ingested twice.
Limits produce explicit errors, not partial runs — an email over a limit is rejected during ingestion, before any resource is stored or checked.
What the report shows
| Artifact | Synthetic link | What the check can establish |
|---|---|---|
| Link in the campaign editor | campaign.example/consultation | This is the intended destination, before delivery rewriting. |
| Link extracted from the received .eml | click.campaign.example/consultation?token=[REDACTED] | The delivered test contains the sending platform wrapper. Eligible public HTTP redirects can be checked. |
| Final HTTP destination in the report | campaign.example/consultation?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=autumn-consultations | A reviewer can compare the actual destination and tracking with the agreed campaign. |
Invented links, not customer data or a measured redirect chain. The uploaded received source is the artifact under review. Save a fresh .eml after changing the campaign; the previous file does not update itself.
Safety and limits
The raw message body and attachment bytes are parsed transiently and are not stored in SendProofs domain tables. What a report keeps is deliberately small: subject, sender address, message id, timestamps, the extracted URLs with occurrence counts, and short snippets of visible link text so you can tell links apart. The canonical stored URLs are encrypted at the application level, and visible reports show redacted copies — data handling in full. Checking itself is bounded and request-safe, described in the security model.
Not included
- No inbox connection — SendProofs never asks for mailbox access or credentials. The workflow is file-based: you save the delivered email and upload it.
- No draft or pasted-HTML checking — a draft does not contain the rewritten links, so checking it would reopen exactly the gap this page describes.
- No rendering — no screenshots and no client matrix. SendProofs reports on links, images and tracking, not on how the email looks.
Related capabilities
Every unique public link in the delivered email, requested once with bounded, safe HTTP checks and the resulting status recorded as evidence.
Redirect evidenceRedirects followed up to three hops with every step recorded — source, target and status — plus warnings for HTTPS downgrades, loops and dead ends.
Evidence reportsTimestamped, human-readable evidence for every checked resource, with a clear next action for each state — not an opaque score or a pass stamp.
Upload your next delivered test
Free workspace — 100 resource checks each month, no card at signup.