Check the edited journey step before it runs unattended
A campaign gets a launch-day audience; an automation edit gets nobody. When you change a link or template in a live welcome series or winback flow, that change sends itself — to every new subscriber, for weeks, with no one watching. SendProofs turns the delivered test of the edited step into recorded evidence before you switch the flow back on.
The moment this matters
The trigger is small: swapping the CTA destination in step 3 of the welcome series, updating the winback template, pointing an onboarding email at a new help article. The edit takes minutes, so the verification usually does too — send a test, click the changed link in your mail client, re-enable the flow.
The failure mode is what makes automations different from campaigns. A dead link in a one-off send produces complaints within the hour. A dead link in step 3 of a welcome series produces nothing you can see — it greets every new signup, one at a time, until someone happens to report it weeks later. Silent failure is the default, which is why the check has to be deliberate, and why it has to run against the delivered message rather than the editor preview.
Who owns the decision
The marketer who edits the flow. Automation edits rarely get the review a campaign launch gets — there is no send window, no approval thread, no second pair of eyes on step 3 of a sequence that shipped last year. Re-enabling the flow is the approval, and the person clicking that toggle answers for the unattended weeks that follow.
The QA pass for an edited journey step
-
Deliver the edited step to yourself
Enroll a test address or use your automation platform's test send for the specific email you changed. The goal is the message as the platform actually sends it — links rewritten, tracking attached.
-
Save it as a .eml file
Works with an email saved from Gmail, Outlook on the web or Apple Mail — step-by-step guide.
-
Upload it to your workspace
Every unique link and remote image is extracted. Links recognized as action-bearing by URL and link-text patterns — unsubscribe and preference-center links are core cases — are marked Protected and never opened.
-
Read the evidence
Each eligible destination gets one bounded check, redirects are followed up to 3 hops with every hop recorded (redirect evidence), and UTM review runs on each link's final URL — so you see where the rewritten link resolves through its HTTP redirect chain, rather than where the flow editor says it points.
-
Fix, re-test, recheck, then re-enable
Corrections happen in your automation platform. Deliver a fresh test of the step and upload it again before the flow goes back live.
The evidence handoff
Automation edits are usually solo work, so the handoff is mostly to your future self — and to whoever asks later. The report is timestamped: it records what was checked, when, and the status or error each check recorded. Paste the findings into the change note or ticket where you track flow edits, and the question of whether step 3 was verified after the January change has an answer with a date on it. The report itself stays in your workspace; what travels is what you write down.
A sample scenario
Sample data
A welcome series had its step-3 CTA swapped to a newer landing page. On the delivered test of the updated step, the platform-rewritten link resolved through its click-tracking hop to campaign.example/welcome/getting-started — a page retired two quarters earlier. Final status 404: Broken. The flow stayed paused, the link was corrected in the automation platform, and the recheck on a fresh test came back Healthy. Without the delivered-test check, every new signup would have hit that 404 until someone reported it.
Limitations and non-goals
- SendProofs checks the one delivered message you upload. It does not connect to your automation platform, monitor live journeys or re-run checks on a schedule — repeat the pass after each edit.
- It fixes nothing. Corrections happen in your platform; SendProofs verifies the fresh test.
- A Healthy result is evidence about public destinations at check time. It does not guarantee those destinations stay up for the weeks the automation runs unattended.
- Unsubscribe and preference-center links are listed as Protected and stay unopened by design — review them manually before re-enabling the flow.
Check the step you just edited
Free workspace — 100 resource checks each month, no card at signup.