What happens when you upload a delivered test email
SendProofs inspects the message that actually reached your inbox — after your sending platform rewrote the links and added tracking — and turns it into evidence a human can approve against. Here is the whole system, end to end, including what it will not do.
1. The delivered email is the artifact
The email your recipients get is not the template you designed. Sending platforms rewrite
every link through their click-tracking domains, append tracking parameters and rehost
images. SendProofs therefore inspects the received test email — the
.eml file you save from your own inbox — because that is the artifact that
carries the final links in a form you can hand to a checker.
More on delivered-email checks.
2. Accepted input and hard limits
Limits are enforced before anything is stored or requested — an email over a limit produces an error, not a partial run.
3. Extraction and deduplication
From the HTML part, SendProofs collects 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, so a link that appears five times is checked once and reported with its
occurrence count.
4. Protected destinations are classified before any request
Before a single request leaves SendProofs, every URL is classified. Links recognized as action-bearing by URL and anchor-text patterns — unsubscribe and preference-center links, sign-in and password-reset links, verification, invitation and order/purchase actions — are marked Protected and are never requested. Likely tracking pixels are treated the same way. Protected items still appear in the report, marked “Not opened”, so you can review them by hand. How protected actions work.
5. Bounded public checks
Eligible public destinations receive a bounded HTTP request identified by the
SendProofs/0.1 user agent: private and internal network addresses are blocked,
redirects are followed up to 3 hops with every hop recorded, and each resource gets strict
connect, read and total-time budgets. There is no browser, no JavaScript, no cookies and no
retries. Full security model.
6. Deterministic tracking checks
For links, UTM review runs on the final URL after HTTP redirects — missing required keys, duplicates, blank values and non-canonical casing are each recorded as named issues on the resource. Campaign tracking review.
7. Evidence states and next actions
- Healthy
- Destination answered 2xx with no warnings. No action.
- Warning
- Reachable, but something needs a human decision — a tracking issue, an HTTPS downgrade, an unexpected content type. Review before approval.
- Broken
- Failed a deterministic check — an error status, timeout or dead redirect. Fix in your sending platform, send a fresh test, recheck.
- Protected
- Recognized as action-bearing and not opened. Review manually.
- Blocked
- Stopped by network safety policy (for example a private address). Review manually.
- Inconclusive
- The destination limited automated access (401/403/429). Neither a pass nor a failure — review manually.
When a run completes, the campaign outcome rolls up honestly: any Broken resource marks the campaign Failed; Blocked or Inconclusive items make it Incomplete — manual review required; interrupted runs are always Incomplete, never a silent pass. How to read a report.
8. What a report looks like
| Resource | State | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| campaign.example/launch?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=aug-launch | Healthy | 200 after 2 redirects · 312 ms · 14:02 UTC |
| campaign.example/pricing/summer-2026 | Broken | 404 at final destination — fix in your sending platform, then recheck |
| campaign.example/blog/whats-new?utm_source=email | Warning | 200, but the workspace's required utm_campaign is missing on the final URL |
| example.com/unsubscribe/%5BREDACTED%5D | Protected | Not opened — action-bearing link, review manually |
| img.campaign.example/hero-aug.png | Healthy | 200 · image/png · 96 ms |
| partner.example/offer | Inconclusive | 403 — destination limited automated access, review manually |
Sample data. Full sample run: 15 Healthy, 2 Warning, 1 Broken, 3 Protected, 2 Inconclusive, 1 Blocked — campaign outcome Failed until the broken destination is fixed and rechecked. 20 of the 24 resources consumed a check; the 3 Protected items and 1 Blocked item were never requested.
9. Data lifecycle
Raw message body and attachment bytes are processed transiently and never persisted. What
the report keeps: subject, sender, timestamps, the extracted URLs (stored encrypted, shown
redacted) and short link-text snippets. Visible reports replace token-like values with
[REDACTED]. Data handling in full.
What SendProofs explicitly does not test
- Deliverability, inbox placement or spam filtering — no prediction of where the email lands.
- Visual rendering across email clients — no screenshots, no client matrix.
- Whether recipient mailboxes exist, or anything about your sender reputation — SendProofs does not measure either.
- Destinations behind sign-ins or bot protection — those are reported Protected or Inconclusive, not guessed at.
- Fixing anything automatically — SendProofs reports evidence; you fix the campaign in the platform where you built it.
Capabilities in depth
Why SendProofs inspects the email that actually arrived — after your platform rewrote links and added tracking — instead of the draft or template.
Link checkingEvery 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.
Remote image checksVerify the remote images recipients will load: reachability, content-type sanity and redirect behavior, with likely tracking pixels identified and left unopened.
Campaign trackingUTM review on the final URL after every redirect: missing required keys, duplicate keys, blank values and non-canonical casing, recorded per link.
Protected actionsUnsubscribe, sign-in, reset and purchase links are identified before any request and never opened. SendProofs lists them for your manual review instead.
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.
Check your next campaign before you approve it
Free workspace — 100 resource checks each month, no card at signup.