Click Preview & test, which appears on the email campaign creation page, in the Drag & Drop email editor, and on the email campaign listing page. Open the Send test email tab, select recipients, and click Send test.
Brevo differs from most sending platforms in one structural way: you cannot type an address into a test send. Recipients come from an account-level test list, capped at 20 addresses, and every address on it has to already exist as a contact in your account. If your test list is empty, the tab has nothing to send to, which is the most common reason people conclude the feature is broken.
There is a second detail on the free plan that matters more than it looks. Brevo states that if you are on a Free plan, the links used in your email design will expire approximately 30 minutes after the reception of the test email.
| What you want to check | Brevo tab | Works on free plan |
|---|---|---|
| Layout across email clients | View in inbox | Yes |
| Personalization resolving for a contact | Preview | Yes |
| The message as it really arrives | Send test email | Yes |
| Whether your links resolve | Send test email | Only for about 30 minutes |
| Whether it lands in spam | Not available in Brevo | No |
Create the test list first
The test list is set once at account level and reused by every campaign, so this is a one-time setup rather than a per-send step.
- Click the account dropdown and select Settings, then Campaigns.
- Under Test List, click Set up.
- Enter the addresses you want to test with, one per line, pressing Enter after each.
- Click Save.
Each address must already be a contact in Brevo before it can join the test list, so add it through your contacts first. The cap is 20 addresses for the whole account, which is worth planning around if several people test several campaigns: the list is shared, so adding a new reviewer means removing someone else once it is full.
Brevo's documentation for the test list was last updated on 31 July 2026, and for the preview and test panel on 8 August 2026.
Send a test email in Brevo
- Open the campaign and click Preview & test.
- Go to the Send test email tab.
- Select the recipients you want from your test list.
- To add someone who is not on it yet, click Manage test list, add them, and refresh the page so they appear.
- Click Send test.
Recipients get the email in their inbox as if they were customers, which is the useful part: unlike a platform that mutates the subject line or substitutes the From address, a Brevo test arrives looking like the real thing.
The 30-minute link expiry invalidates a whole kind of testing
On the free plan, the links in a test email expire approximately 30 minutes after the test arrives. Think about the shape of a normal review and the problem becomes obvious. Someone sends the test, the reviewers get to it after a meeting, and every link is dead. The campaign looks broken. It is not.
Two ways round it. Send the test immediately before people are going to look at it, and tell them the window. Or check links from a real campaign send to a seed address, where nothing expires.
Broken links are worth catching properly rather than approximately, because they are common. Across messages tested with Unspam this year, 80% are clean of broken links, which puts one campaign in five in the other group.
Preview resolves personalization, and picks the language for you
The Preview tab renders the email as a specific recipient would receive it, so you can confirm that personalization variables such as contact attributes or event data are working. This is the tab that answers "does the first name actually appear", and it does it without spending a send.
One behavior here catches out multilingual senders. Brevo automatically determines which language version to send based on the test contact's language attribute. If that attribute is wrong or empty on your test contact, you will be shown the wrong version and reasonably conclude the campaign is misconfigured. Check the contact before you check the campaign.
View in inbox is rendering, not placement
The View in inbox tab compares how your design appears across email clients. Click Generate previews, and Brevo produces screenshots grouped into web-based, mobile-based and desktop-based email apps, with Load more under each category to reveal the rest.
The tab name is doing some work here. It shows what your email looks like inside an inbox, not whether your email reaches one. Nothing in Brevo answers the second question: there is no spam score, no filter simulation and no seed testing in the product.
That is normal for the category rather than a Brevo shortcoming. A sending platform can see what it sent; it cannot see what the receiving provider decided. Of the campaigns run through Unspam so far this year, 65% of emails reach the primary inbox, and the Unspam deliverability benchmark tracks the difference by provider.
When you need a real campaign send instead
Once the rendering is right and personalization resolves, the open questions are about the send rather than the message: your authentication as delivered, your links resolving through a domain with clean history, and where the campaign is actually filed.
The Brevo deliverability guide covers that setup, including the daily sending cap on the free plan that a seed send counts against. For placement, an inbox placement test delivers your campaign to seed mailboxes at Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and five other providers and reports where each copy landed.
When the campaign is ready, run it through the free Unspam spam test as a real send, with the links live and the clock not running.
