monday.com Email Test Mode: Preview Before Sending

meta_description: “monday.com email test mode doesn’t exist — no preview before sending. Learn why this is risky and how BoardBridge adds email testing and preview.”

You’ve just configured an email automation in monday.com. The client will receive this email when their project status changes to “Confirmed.” You’ve written the email content, added dynamic column values, and set the trigger.

Now you want to test it — send a preview to yourself to verify the formatting, check that the dynamic fields populate correctly, and make sure the email says what you think it says.

There is no test mode. No preview with sample data. No “send test email” button.

Your only option: trigger the automation with real data and hope it works. Change a real item’s status to “Confirmed,” watch the email go out to the actual client, and pray you didn’t make a mistake.

This is monday.com email automations: no preview, no dry-run or test mode, no way to verify what recipients will see before the email goes live. It’s a limitation that forces teams to test in production, risking embarrassing mistakes and broken workflows being discovered only after clients receive them.

As a certified monday.com partner managing workflows for 110+ clients, we’ve seen teams accidentally send test emails to real clients, discover broken dynamic fields after 50 emails went out, and scramble to manually correct mistakes that should have been caught in preview.

Email Pain Point #16: No Email Preview or Test Mode

Email Pain Point #16: Monday.com email automations have no testing capabilities. You cannot preview emails before sending, you cannot send test emails, and you cannot redirect emails to a test address during development.

When you configure an email automation in monday.com, the email body field is a plain text box with placeholders for dynamic column values like {Client Name} and {Event Date}.

What you cannot do:

• Preview how the email will look with real data before sending
• Send a test email to yourself with sample data
• Verify that dynamic column values resolve correctly
• Check for typos, formatting issues, or broken merge fields
• See what happens when a referenced column is empty
• Redirect all outgoing emails to a test address during testing

Your only testing option: Trigger the automation with real monday.com items and see what happens.

This affects every email automation use case where testing is important — which is to say, all of them:

• Client-facing communications (can’t afford mistakes)
• Vendor notifications (broken emails damage relationships)
• Payment and invoice emails (financial data must be accurate)
• Form request emails (broken links render workflows useless)
• Time-sensitive notifications (can’t wait until production to discover errors)

The lack of email preview and test mode creates real risk: you either test cautiously (manually triggering with dummy data and risking real sends) or you skip testing and discover errors after recipients complain.

Related: If you’re struggling with monday.com email automation limitations, check the official documentation on email automations for all available features and limitations.

What monday.com Does Provide: Mass Email Test Sends

Monday.com’s Mass Email feature (part of the CRM product, separate from automations) includes a test email function. Source Before sending a bulk email campaign, you can send a test copy to yourself to verify formatting and content.

However, Mass Email is not part of the automation system. Source Mass Email is designed for manual bulk marketing sends — newsletters, announcements, campaigns. It does not support:

• Triggered emails based on status changes
• Button-click-initiated emails
• Item-created or item-updated emails
• Conditional emails based on column values

If you’re using email automations (the vast majority of monday.com workflows), you do not have access to the Mass Email test functionality. The two systems are separate.

Why the Lack of Preview Creates Real Problems

Problem 1: Testing Requires Real Triggers

To see what your email automation looks like with actual data, you have to trigger it. This means:

• Creating a real monday.com item (or using an existing one)
• Changing the status or performing the trigger action
• Watching the email send to the configured recipients

If you’re testing a client-facing email, this means the client receives your test. You can try to mitigate this by:

• Using a dummy email column value (but then you’re not testing the real recipient flow)
• Using your own email as the recipient (but then you’re not testing the actual automation configuration)
• Creating test items on a separate test board (but then you’re not testing the production automation)

None of these approaches let you safely preview the email with real data before going live.

Problem 2: Dynamic Field Errors Discovered Late

If you misspell a column name in a dynamic placeholder — {Evnet Date} instead of {Event Date} — monday.com doesn’t warn you. The email sends with the placeholder unresolved, and recipients see {Evnet Date} as literal text.

Without preview, you discover this error only after the email has been sent — potentially to dozens or hundreds of recipients.

Problem 3: Empty Column Handling Is Unknown

What happens when you reference a column that’s empty on a particular item? Does the email:

• Show the placeholder as literal text?
• Show a blank space?
• Show “(empty)” or some default text?
• Fail to send entirely?

You won’t know until you trigger the automation with an item that has an empty column. Without preview, there’s no way to test edge cases before going live.

Problem 4: Multi-Recipient Testing Is Risky

If your automation sends to multiple recipients (using the semicolon-separated workaround or a People column), testing means those people receive the test email.

Real scenario:

• You set up an automation that notifies the board subscribers
• You want to test it
• You trigger it
• All 10 board subscribers receive your test email

You’ve just spammed your entire team with a test message because there was no way to redirect emails to a test address during testing.

Problem 5: Iteration Requires Repeated Real Sends

Email writing is iterative. You draft content, preview it, adjust phrasing, preview again, fix formatting, preview again. With monday.com automations:

• Draft content → trigger automation → see email → realize mistake
• Update content → trigger automation again → see email → realize another mistake
• Update content → trigger automation again → …

Each iteration sends a real email. If you iterate 5 times to get the content right, you’ve sent 5 real emails.

What Most Guides Don’t Tell You: The Hidden Costs of No Preview

Cost 1: Broken Workflows Discovered in Production Without preview, you don’t know if your email works until recipients receive it. If a critical form link is broken, a dynamic field doesn’t resolve, or the content contains an error, you discover it only after clients complain.

Cost 2: Professional Embarrassment Sending a test email to a real client — or worse, sending a broken email to dozens of clients — damages your professional reputation. Clients wonder: “Did they even test this before sending it to me?”

Cost 3: Time Spent on Manual Testing Teams waste significant time manually triggering automations with dummy data, creating test boards, or asking colleagues to “ignore this test email.” All of this could be avoided with a simple preview function.

Cost 4: Hesitation to Iterate Because testing requires real sends, teams hesitate to iterate on email content. They settle for “good enough” phrasing because improving it requires triggering yet another real email. The lack of preview reduces content quality.

Cost 5: Inability to Demo Workflows When onboarding new team members or presenting workflows to stakeholders, you cannot safely demonstrate email automations without sending real emails. You either:

• Explain conceptually without showing (less effective)
• Trigger a real email and ask people to ignore it (unprofessional)
• Skip email demonstration entirely (incomplete training)

How BoardBridge Solves This: Email Test Mode + Preview with Sample Data

BoardBridge by TaskRhino — Form & Workflow Automation for monday.com — includes two features that eliminate the email testing problem: test mode and email preview with sample data.

How It Works: Email Preview with Sample Data

When you configure an email automation in BoardBridge, you can click Preview to see exactly how the email will render with realistic sample data.

What happens during preview:

1. The system generates type-appropriate sample values for all dynamic fields:

• Text columns → realistic sample text
• Date columns → formatted dates
• Email columns → sample email addresses
• Number columns → sample numbers
• Dropdown/Status columns → sample labels

1. All merge variables are replaced with sample data
2. The email renders as HTML (if using rich text formatting) or plain text
3. You see exactly what recipients will see — subject line, from name, email body

Unresolved variables are highlighted in red — if you misspelled a column name or referenced a column that doesn’t exist, the preview shows the error before you send anything.

Example:

• Dynamic field: {{Client Name}}
• Preview shows: “John Smith” (sample value)
• You can verify the field resolves and the email reads naturally

Example of an error:

• Dynamic field: {{Evnet Date}} (typo)
• Preview shows: {{Evnet Date}} in red with an error indicator
• You fix the typo before sending

This preview-before-send workflow catches errors before they reach recipients.

How It Works: Email Test Mode (Redirect All Emails)

BoardBridge also includes organization-level test mode that redirects all outgoing emails to a test address.

When test mode is enabled:

1. All emails are redirected to the configured test address (e.g., testing@yourcompany.com)
2. The subject line is prefixed with [TEST] to clearly identify test emails
3. The original intended recipients are shown in the email body for reference
4. CC recipients are stripped (so you’re not spamming team members during testing)
5. The email sends immediately so you can verify content, formatting, and dynamic field resolution

Note: BCC recipients are currently not stripped in test mode — this is a known gap.

Example:

• Real automation: Send to client@example.com, CC team@yourcompany.com
• Test mode enabled: Email redirected to testing@yourcompany.com
• Subject line: [TEST] Your Event Confirmation
• Email body includes: “This email would have been sent to: client@example.com (CC: team@yourcompany.com)”

You can safely test the full automation flow without any risk of spamming real recipients.

Testing Workflow with BoardBridge

Step 1: Configure the email automation

• Write email content
• Add dynamic variables
• Set up CC/BCC recipients
• Configure trigger conditions

Step 2: Preview with sample data

• Click Preview
• Verify all dynamic fields resolve correctly
• Check for red-highlighted errors
• Adjust content as needed

Step 3: Enable test mode

• Turn on organization-level test mode
• Set test email address (your testing inbox)

Step 4: Trigger the automation with real data

• Change a monday.com item’s status or click the trigger button
• Email is redirected to your test address
• Verify the email with real data looks correct
• Check formatting, links, and dynamic field values

Step 5: Iterate if needed

• Adjust email content
• Re-trigger automation
• Test email sent again to your test address (not to real recipients)

Step 6: Disable test mode and go live

• Turn off test mode
• Automations now send to real recipients
• You’ve verified everything works before going live

This workflow eliminates the risk of sending broken or test emails to real clients.

Real-World Example: Form Request Email Testing

One of our clients sends 50+ automated emails per event, many of which contain form links. These aren’t just any emails — they’re rich HTML emails with multiple dynamic fields and CTAs. Before BoardBridge, they tested email automations by:

• Creating dummy client items with their own email addresses
• Triggering the automation
• Hoping the form links worked
• Discovering broken links only when real clients reported them

After implementing BoardBridge test mode + preview:

• Step 1: Configure form request email with dynamic form URLs
• Step 2: Preview email with sample data — verify form link placeholder resolves
• Step 3: Enable test mode
• Step 4: Trigger automation with real event item — email redirected to test address
• Step 5: Click the form link in the test email — verify it opens the correct form for that item
• Step 6: Confirm everything works, disable test mode
• Step 7: Automation goes live with confidence

Results:

• Broken form links caught before clients see them (dropped from 3-4 per month to zero)
• Email content iteration improved (no longer hesitant to make edits because testing is safe)
• Professional confidence increased (team knows emails work before they go out)
• Client complaints about broken emails eliminated

The Bottom Line: Email Testing Shouldn’t Require Real Sends

Email automation should include basic testing capabilities: preview with sample data, send test emails, redirect outgoing messages during testing. These features have been standard in email marketing platforms, CRMs, and workflow automation tools for over a decade.

Monday.com email automations provide none of this. You cannot preview how emails will look with real data. You cannot send test emails without triggering the automation. You cannot redirect emails to a test address during testing.

The result: teams either test cautiously in production (risking mistakes being seen by real recipients) or skip testing entirely (risking broken workflows being discovered only when clients complain).

The lack of preview and test mode isn’t just inconvenient — it increases the risk of professional embarrassment, broken workflows, and client-facing errors that should have been caught before going live. This becomes even more critical when you’re building complex cross-board automation workflows with multiple steps and dynamic data.

BoardBridge by TaskRhino includes email preview with sample data (catch errors before sending) and organization-level test mode (redirect all emails to a test address). You can safely test, iterate, and verify email automations without any risk of spamming real recipients.

Worried about broken emails in production? BoardBridge helps you test safely before going live. Book a free 30-minute demo: https://calendly.com/rp-spaceo/call-with-rakesh-est-timezone