Sending your first test email

Use the sandbox to send a real email from a HubSpot workflow before you set up a domain or pay anything.

Overview

Every account starts in the sandbox. Sandbox sends are real emails, delivered to any recipient, but they come from Cambium’s shared sandbox address instead of your own domain. You get 20 sandbox sends per HubSpot account — enough to test your templates and workflows end to end. The 20 never reset, not even if you reinstall.

This walkthrough sends one test email to yourself.

Before you begin

• Transactional Email installed. See Installing Transactional Email.
• A HubSpot contact with your own email address. The recipient of every send must be a HubSpot contact’s primary email address.

You don’t need a sender profile or a sending domain yet: the built-in sandbox sender works from the moment you install.

Steps

1. Create a template. In HubSpot, create a regular marketing email with the drag-and-drop editor — for example, a short order confirmation with {{ contact.firstname }} in the greeting. Save it; you don’t need to send or schedule it from HubSpot. See Creating a transactional email template.
2. Create a workflow. Go to Automation → Workflows and create a contact-based workflow from scratch with manual enrollment.
3. Add the action. Add the Send transactional email action and fill in:
   • Email template — the email you just created.
   • Recipient email — the contact’s Email property.
   • Sender profile — Sandbox sender (sandbox only), or one of your sender profiles if you’ve already created one.
4. Turn the workflow on and enroll yourself. Enroll the contact with your email address.
5. Check your inbox. The email arrives from the sandbox address. With the sandbox sender, the From name is Cambium Transactional Email (a super admin can change it on Settings → Sender profiles) and replies go to the person who installed the app. With a sender profile, it uses the profile’s From name and reply-to.

You’ve sent your first transactional email. On App Home, Usage shows 1 of 20 used under Sandbox sends, and searching the Send log for your address shows the send as Sent, then Delivered.

What happens next

• Selecting a template in the action starts its content review in the background. A send waits up to 10 minutes for the review to finish. See How the transactional content review works.
• Only emails that actually go out use a sandbox send. A send that fails — say, contact_not_found or suppressed — doesn’t count toward the 20.
• When the 20 sandbox sends are used up, sends fail with quota_exhausted until you go live. See Going live.

Tips

• Each address can receive at most 5 transactional emails in any 24 hours, so after a few tests to yourself, switch to another test contact.
• If no email arrives, search the Send log for your address. The status explains what happened; look it up in Send status and error codes.
• Use sandbox sends for testing, not for real customer email: they come from a shared address, not your brand’s domain.

Related articles

• Creating a sender profile
• Adding the Send transactional email action
• Creating a transactional email template
• Going live