This feature is currently in beta. Contact your Technical Account Manager for access.
The recipient preview resolves your dynamic recipients up front, before Matik generates anything. You see the real email addresses each input value produces, flagged for validity, as they stream in. This lets you spot-check who is included and catch problems early, without spending the time to generate every email first.
With approval before sending, Matik also holds the generated emails until you review them. You read every email exactly as it will be delivered, then confirm the send or discard the run. Nothing reaches a recipient until you confirm.
Previewing Recipients
When you start a Mail send, the Preview Email & Recipients phase begins. Matik generates a visual preview of your email, and starts querying your recipient dynamic content so it can showcase the results. This processing happens live, with a progress bar that updates as Matik finishes each input value. The recipient list fills in as each input value completes processing. You do not need to refresh.
If your account has approval before sending, the preview opens on the Recipients Preview tab of the run's Email Outbox page instead of in a pop-up. The preview itself works the same way.
The preview is organized into tabs:
- Recipients Preview: your primary (To) recipients.
- CC Preview: your CC recipients, if the email uses them.
- BCC Preview: your BCC recipients, if the email uses them.
- Email Preview: the standard visual preview of the email itself, including attachments.
Within each recipient tab, Matik groups addresses by validity into All, Passed, Warning, and Invalid, so you can jump straight to the addresses that need a look.
Note: Closing the preview cancels the send and ends processing. If you try to leave before it finishes, Matik warns you ("Recipient preview is still loading. Leaving will cancel it.") so you do not inadvertently lose your progress. In the Email Outbox, leaving the page does not cancel the preview: open the run in Flows and click View Preview to return to it.
Using the Preview
Searching & Filtering Preview Recipients
Once resolution finishes, the search box ("Search by Email, Input Value...") lets you filter the list two ways: by a recipient's email address, or by the input value it came from. Searching by input value is the quick way to answer questions like "who is getting emailed at Acme?" without scrolling the full list.
You can search on the primary, CC, and BCC tabs. Search becomes available once resolution is complete.
Reviewing Invalid Recipients
Matik flags addresses purely on syntax, and sorts them into three buckets you can filter with the tabs at the top of each recipient list:
- Passed: the address is well-formed and looks deliverable.
- Warning: the address is syntactically valid but looks risky. Placeholder-style addresses such as noreply@ are a common example. These will still be sent to.
- Invalid: the address fails a basic format check. Common examples are an address with no @ (jane.doeacme.com), a missing domain (jane.doe@), or a domain with no dot (jane@acme). These fail on send.
Flagging is there to help you catch bad data before you commit to a send, which is especially useful when your recipient data is not perfectly clean. Flagged addresses are not removed for you.
- If you want to remove/fix flagged recipients first: cancel the preview and edit your Recipients query and/or your data set as needed. Then initiate the Mail send again when you are ready.
- If you don't want to make a fix upfront: you can choose to proceed. Matik will simply still generate and attempt to send to flagged recipients, and they'll likely just bounce or throw an error on delivery
Previewing Email Content and Attachments
You can also load a preview of the email and attachments for a given recipient on the Email Preview tab. Once a primary recipient has resolved, they can be selected from the dropdown menu. Matik will on-demand load a preview for the selected recipient.
It is expected that there's some loading the first time you load a preview for a given recipient.
How Recipient Resolution, Generation, and Sending Work
Understanding the order of operations tells you exactly what will and will not be generated. Matik works through three steps for every input value (for example, every account):
- Resolve recipients. Matik runs your primary recipient dynamic content (and CC/BCC content, if configured) against your data and collects the email addresses each input value produces.
- Check validity. Each resolved address is checked against email syntax and sorted into Passed, Warning, or Invalid. This is a format check only. It does not confirm that the mailbox exists or can receive mail.
- Build the send list. Matik generates one email for every input value that returned at least one primary recipient. CC and BCC addresses are attached to that email, but they do not determine generation on their own.
Here are some examples of how this works in practice. Say your email bulks on an account input and emails a primary contact at each account:
| Account (input value) | Primary recipient resolves to | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Acme | Three valid addresses | One email is generated and sent to all three recipients. |
| Initech |
One address with invalid syntax (for example jane.doe@)
|
The email is still generated, but will fail to send. The address is flagged Invalid in the preview so you can catch it first. |
| Globex | Recipients query returns null | No email is generated for Globex. It is skipped and does not appear in your generated emails. |
CC and BCC addresses follow the same validity check but never gate generation. If an email's primary recipient is valid but a CC address is invalid, the email is still generated and sent to the primary recipient. Matik simply gets an email error or bounce from the CC address upon sending.
Proceeding to Generation or Canceling
The preview is an optional step. You can click Generate Emails to confirm and move forward with the Mail send at any time, even if the preview has not finished resolving. Matik will simply continue processing the recipients as part of the committed Mail flow.
If you cancel or leave before the preview finishes, the flow is fully dropped, and nothing is generated or sent. You can start a fresh send whenever you are ready.
In the Email Outbox, the button is Skip Preview and Generate while recipients are still resolving, and Start generation once the preview is complete. Next to it is the Require review before sending emails setting, described below.
Requiring Approval Before Sending
When Require review before sending emails is on, Matik generates every email and then holds the run at In Review. Nothing is sent until you confirm. When it is off, emails send automatically as soon as generation completes, as they do today.
- On by default: Each new manual send starts with the setting on. Turn it off in the recipient preview footer, or on the Summary tab under Review before sending, where it reads Require approval before send.
- Locked once generation starts: After generation starts, the setting is shown but can no longer be changed, so you can always see which choice the run was started with.
- You are notified when it is ready: When a held run finishes generating, the person who started it gets an email ("Your emails are ready for review") and an in-app notification, both linking to the run's Email Outbox. In Flows, the run shows a Review Emails button.
- Who can review and send: The person who started the run, and any Admin who can edit the Mail template, can review it, send it, or discard it. End users can review only the runs they started. Only the person who started the run is notified.
Reviewing Emails in the Email Outbox
Every manual send has an Email Outbox page, whether or not it requires approval. Open it from the run in Flows with View Email Outbox. The page has these tabs:
- Summary: the run's status, the approval setting, and a run log of what has happened so far.
- Recipients Preview: the recipient preview described above. After the run sends, the Analytics tab replaces it.
- Outbox: every generated email. This tab is unavailable until generation starts.
Browsing the Email List
Emails appear in the Outbox tab as they generate. You can watch a long run fill in without refreshing. Before sending, the list is split into Will send and Won't send. An email won't send if:
- it errored during generation,
- it has warnings, including warnings on an attached template, or
- it did not meet a Send Condition, including a Send Condition on an attached template.
These are the same rules Matik applies to every Mail send. The Outbox shows you which emails they affect before anything goes out.
To find specific emails, use Search emails, filter by Generation Status (Success, Warnings, or Errors, each with or without Send Condition not met) or by Bulk Input value, and sort by generation status, send status, recipient, or subject.
Reading an Email
Select an email to see it exactly as it will be delivered: the recipient, CC, BCC, sender, subject, and rendered body. Attached and linked templates appear inside the email with their generation status, and you can preview and download attachments. Warnings and errors show enough detail to identify what went wrong. Nothing in the Outbox is editable.
Sending or Discarding a Run
While a run is In Review, you have two options:
- Send: Click Confirm [N] Emails. The Confirm Send screen shows how many emails will send, and how many won't, by reason. Click Send [N] Emails to start sending, or Cancel to keep reviewing. Only emails under Will send are sent.
- Discard: Choose Discard Run from the actions menu. Nothing is sent. The generated emails stay readable, and the run shows who discarded it.
While a run is still generating, you can stop it with Cancel Generation from the actions menu. Emails that already generated are kept for reading but will not send.
After a run sends, each email shows Sent or Not sent, and the Analytics tab shows delivery and engagement. Download Analytics CSV and Download Engagement CSV are in the actions menu.
Scheduled and Triggered Flows
For a manual send, what you see in a completed preview is exactly what will be generated and sent. The recipients are locked in to what the preview resolved.
The recipient preview also appears when you set up a scheduled or triggered send, but it works differently than a manual send.
For scheduled and triggered sends, this is a point-in-time preview only. It shows how your recipients resolve right now. A scheduled or triggered send resolves its recipients again when it actually runs, using your data at that moment. The recipients and content you see now may not match what the send produces later. Only a manual send generates exactly the recipients shown in its preview.
Scheduled sends, triggered sends, and test sends are never held for approval. They send as soon as generation completes.
Best Practices
- Search by input value to spot-check: Filtering by the input you're personalizing on is the fast way to check if the right people are being emailed.
- Check the Warning and Invalid tabs: If a large proportion of your recipients are flagged, it might be worth fixing before committing to generation.
- Fix problems at the source: Because flagged addresses are not removed automatically, correcting the data in your source system can streamline sends by reducing what Matik needs to process.
- Check Won't send before confirming: Filtering to Won't send shows every email that errored, has warnings, or missed a Send Condition. Confirm Send shows the totals, but the list shows you which emails and why.
- Keep approval on for new or high-stakes sends: Turn it off once a template has proven reliable and you no longer need to read the emails first.
Limitations
- Syntax validation only: The validity check confirms an address is well-formed. It does not verify that the mailbox exists or can receive mail, so a Passed address can still bounce.
- Flagged addresses are not removed automatically: Matik will still generate content for flagged primary recipients unless you correct them at the source and restart the send.
- Scheduled and triggered previews are point-in-time: Only a manual send is guaranteed to produce the recipients shown in its preview. Scheduled and triggered sends re-resolve at run time.
- Approval applies to manual sends only: Scheduled, triggered, and test sends always send automatically.
- A run is sent or discarded as a whole: You cannot edit, exclude, or retry individual emails. To fix an email, discard the run, correct the template or data, and start a new send.
- The approval choice locks at generation: Once generation starts, you cannot turn approval on or off for that run.
- Microsoft 365 attachments: Only the person who started the run can download a Microsoft 365 attachment from the Outbox. Anyone with access to the run can still preview it.
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