Email testing

Last updated September 21, 2026

Testing a booking system on a site with real customers in it is a nervous business: press the wrong thing and forty people get a confirmation for a booking that does not exist. These two settings let you test on the live site without anybody hearing about it.

Pause all sending

Under Settings → Business → Outbound email. With it on, nothing leaves the site at all — no confirmations, no reminders, no invoices. Messages are still written to the email log and marked held, so you can see exactly what would have gone and to whom.

The five-minute window

In the staff app, More → Email testing. Enter the PIN and sending comes back on for five minutes — but every message is redirected to your own email address, with the intended recipient written across the top of it and [TEST] on the subject. No customer receives anything.

It closes itself

After five minutes it stops, with nothing to remember to undo. That is deliberate: a test mode you have to switch off is a test mode somebody leaves on, and leaving this one on means customers quietly stop being told about their bookings. There is a Stop now button if you finish early, and a countdown on the row while it runs.

About the PIN

It defaults to 9999 and you can change it in settings. It is a speed bump, not a lock — the real control is that only an administrator can open a window at all. The PIN is there so a colleague does not press it by accident.

Pause sendingSettings → Business → Outbound email.

Do your testingNothing reaches customers; the email log shows what would have.

Need to see a real one?Staff app → More → Email testing, enter the PIN.

Five minutes of sendingEvery message comes to you instead of the customer.

Turn sending back onUntick Pause when you have finished testing.

Example

You are changing the reminder wording on a live site with two hundred clients. You pause sending, make the change, open a five-minute window, trigger a reminder, and read it in your own inbox exactly as a customer would have. Nobody else gets anything.

FAQ

Does pausing lose the emails?
They are not sent and not queued — but each one is recorded in the email log with its full text, and every entry there has a Send again button. So a message held by mistake can be sent afterwards.

Does the window send my test to the real customer too?
No. During a window every message goes to you and only you, whoever it was addressed to. The original address is printed at the top of the message.

What if I close the app?
The window keeps running on the site and still expires after five minutes. Reopening the row shows the countdown.

Can a member of staff open one?
No. Only administrators, whatever PIN they have.

I left sending paused by mistake.
The email log will be full of held messages, which is the sign to look for. Untick Pause, then send the important ones again from the log.

Why five minutes?
Long enough to trigger something and read it; short enough that forgetting about it costs you almost nothing.