Before you turn a playbook on, you can see exactly what its email will look like and send yourself a copy. This guide covers how to do that, what the sample data in the preview means, and what the preview can and cannot tell you.

<aside> 💡

In Playbooks, click Edit on a playbook, go to the Send Email action, and click Preview Email.

</aside>

Where to find it

The Preview Email button sits under the email editor in the Send Email action.

It stays greyed out until the email has both a subject and a message. Empty ones are rejected, so there is nothing to preview.

You do not need to save the playbook and you do not need to turn it on. The preview reads whatever is on your screen right now, including edits you have not saved yet.

What the preview shows

The window opens with the email exactly as a recipient sees it, plus three details above it:

Recipients that are set to a variable (something like the job's poster, or the applicant) show as a labelled chip rather than a real address. The preview does not guess at who that would resolve to on a real record.

About the sample data

Personalized fields are filled with sample data, so a preview of a new-job email shows a made-up job at a made-up company.

Two things this buys you:

• The rendering is real. Sample records are built the same way real ones are, so anything computed from a record (a link back to the job, a registration URL) comes out as a genuine working link, not a placeholder.
• The preview is stable. The same playbook produces the same sample data every time you open it. If something looks wrong, you can reopen the preview and see the identical output while you work on it.

<aside> ⚠️

Watch for blanks. If a merge tag cannot be resolved, it renders as nothing at all rather than showing the tag. A sentence reading "Thanks for applying to at" means two tags came out empty. This is exactly what a real recipient would see, which is the whole point of checking.

</aside>

A blank in the preview is not always a blank in production. Sample data does not populate every optional field. But it is worth checking the tag name against your record type before you dismiss it.

Sending yourself a copy

At the bottom of the preview window is Send Yourself a Copy. Your admin email address is filled in already. Change it to any address you want, then click Send Me a Copy.

Use this when you need to see the email in a real inbox: how it renders in Outlook, whether images load, whether the subject line gets truncated on a phone.