Before Starting: Install a couple of extensions/plugins
- If you don’t have it already, install Grammarly (the free version will be good enough.)
- Install Check my links .
- Download the Gmail mobile app from the Android Play Store or iOS App Store .
Use Grammarly to check for simple grammar and spelling mistakes
Open the email compose window in the email service provider.
Check if Grammarly is able to load in the text editor of your email service provider. You will know because there will be a Grammarly icon in the bottom right corner of the text field.
If Grammarly doesn’t work with your text editor, copy all the text into a new Grammarly document using the Chrome extension. Just click on the Grammarly icon and then click New Document.Next, check the words or phrases that have been underlined by Grammarly. Accept or ignore all of Grammarly’s suggested changes until the icon on the bottom right corner turns green and shows no more errors.
Check email in Gmail’s web app
- From your email service provider, send a test email to your own Gmail or Google Apps email address.
- Make sure your browser window is in full screen and check that the email subject isn’t truncated.
- Next, verify that the email’s preview text does not include file names (this can happen sometimes if you include logos in the header of the email and don’t include any copy before the image.)
- Open the email.
- Check that the email meets the following criteria:
- Alignment matches the one used in the email editor.
- The font family, style, size, and color matches the ones used in the email editor.
- Images load properly and have the proper dimensions and aspect ratio.
- Use the Check my links Chrome extension to check for broken links. To do that, click on the extension and wait for the queue to reach zero.
- If the “Invalid links” indicator shows a value of zero, then there are no broken links in your email.
- If there are broken links in your email, they will be highlighted in red. If that happens, you will need to go back to the email editor and fix the broken link.
- Finally, open every link in the email to make sure that each of them is linking to its correct destination URL.
Perform a mobile sanity check with Gmail’s mobile app
Open the test email with the Gmail mobile app and check that it meets the following criteria:
Alignment matches the one used in the email editor.
The font family, style, size, and color matches the ones used in the email editor.
The text is of an appropriate size and it’s easy to read.
The text blocks are not wider than the mobile screen.
Images load properly, have the proper dimensions and aspect ratio, and have resized to fit the mobile screen.
If there is any text on the images that needs to be read by the recipient, make sure that it is large enough to be read without the need to zoom in.
