MCP

Pre-launch QA

TL;DR

  • The failures that embarrass you are boring ones: an unrendered {{FIRST_NAME}}, a dead link, a reply-to nobody reads. Every one is catchable in ten minutes.
  • Send yourself the sequence first, from the real campaign, as a real row in the list — not a preview.
  • Check the list before the copy. A verified list with a mediocre email survives; a perfect email to a 15% bounce rate does not.

The list checks

Bounce exposure. Run verification and look at the rejection count before you launch, not after. Published operating guidance puts the tolerable bounce rate at about 2%, with the instruction to pause and clean the list if a live campaign crosses it (2026) [1]. A list that has been sitting for six months will decay past that on its own.

Duplicates and collisions. The same person reachable at two addresses, or two colleagues at one small company, turns a sequence into a pile-on. Deduplicate by domain as well as by address.

Suppression. Anyone who has opted out, bounced hard, or replied "no" in a previous campaign must be excluded before the send, not filtered afterwards — see Stopping rules and suppression.

The rendering checks

Every variable, with a fallback. The classic failure is a merge tag that renders empty or literal — "Hi ," or "Hi {{FIRST_NAME}}" — because one row had a blank cell. Sort the list by each personalization column and look at the empty ones. Every variable needs a fallback that reads naturally in the sentence, which usually means writing the sentence so it survives the fallback.

Rows at the extremes. Preview the first row, the last row, one with the longest company name, one with a name that carries an apostrophe or a non-ASCII character, and one where every optional field is blank. Bugs live at the edges of the data, not in the middle.

A real test send. Put your own address into the campaign as an ordinary prospect and let the sequence send to it. Previews render templates; a real send exercises the sender identity, the signature, the links, the unsubscribe path and the reply-to together. Read it on a phone, since that is where most of it will be read — see Length, readability, formatting.

The compliance and identity checks

  • The sender name and address are honest, and the reply-to reaches a human who is expecting replies.
  • A physical postal address is present where required, and the opt-out route works when clicked — both are legal obligations in the US regime and good practice everywhere [2].
  • Authentication is in place for the sending domain, since bulk-sender rules make it a hard requirement rather than an optimization [3].
  • Every link resolves, including the ones inside the signature.

See Staying legal in a nutshell for what is obligatory where.

About placement tests

Seed-list tools that report which folder your message reached are worth a look, with two caveats: they measure delivery to their own seed mailboxes rather than to your prospects, and the result moves with the sending domain's reputation, so a clean test on Monday says little about Thursday. Use them to catch an outright authentication failure, not as a green light.

References

  1. Smartlead — Email deliverability guide (vendor guide, Jun 2026)
  2. FTC — CAN-SPAM Act: A compliance guide for business (official guide, current)
  3. Google — Email sender guidelines (support page, requirements in force since Feb 2024)