Testing Brevo emails

If you have never authenticated a domain in Brevo, your subscribers may not see the sender address you typed. Brevo replaces the domain part with its own shared domain (brevosend.com for marketing mail, t-sender-sib.com for transactional) and sends anyway. Brevo calls this a temporary way to protect deliverability, and its own help center admits the downside: people who don't recognise the replaced address may report the email as spam. A single real email, read the way a receiving server reads it, shows the swapped domain straight away.

Before you start

You need a test address from Email Spam Tester, which the home page hands out without a signup. It stays open for an hour and accepts a single message.

Campaigns and test sends in Brevo go only to addresses that already exist as contacts, so whichever route you take below, make the test address a contact first.

Route one: Brevo's test send

Test recipients live in a test list that holds up to 20 addresses. You set it up under the account menu, Settings > Campaigns, where the Test List block has a Set up button. Then:

1. Open the campaign (or the Drag & Drop editor, or the campaign list) and click Preview & test.
2. Switch to the Send test email tab.
3. Choose the test address under Recipients and click Send test.

Route two: the real campaign, sent to one contact

When you want the exact message your list will get, send the campaign itself: under Recipients > Send to pick the test address in the Email addresses drop-down. Brevo lets you pick up to 10 individual contacts there, alongside or instead of lists and segments. Every one must already be a contact.

Brevo quietly leaves blocklisted contacts out of a send, so if an old test contact ended up blocklisted, the campaign simply never goes to it. A fresh test address avoids that, and you need one for every run anyway.

This is also the route for the inbox test. If you ticked it on our home page, add the provider inboxes it lists as contacts next to the test address, or put them all in a small list if the drop-down won't take them, and leave the marker in the subject line. You'll learn which folder the campaign landed in with Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and other providers.

What the report usually says about Brevo mail

Open the Headers tab first, because if the From line ends in brevosend.com or t-sender-sib.com, the authentication results describe Brevo's domain, not yours. Nothing in the email body will change that. Domain authentication will.

If the From is your own domain but DMARC fails, Brevo's troubleshooting article names the likely cause. The domain in the From address doesn't match the domain you authenticated with DKIM. The report shows this as a DKIM alignment failure next to the DMARC result, and our DMARC fail page walks through the repair. The fix plan under the report lists it as well, and the points next to it are the penalty those checks carry now; the AI writes only the explanation.

After authentication, DKIM should pass and line up with your From. SPF often still shows as unaligned, and that is expected, because by default Brevo uses its own domain for the return path and SPF passes on Brevo's return-path domain. The scoring is gentler on unaligned SPF when DKIM is aligned and takes off less than half the usual penalty. Brevo is rolling out branded subdomains, which move the return path and the tracking links, normally on r.brevolinks.com, onto your domain and give you SPF alignment too, though not every account has that option yet.

The sending IP is looked up on 21 blocklists, and unless you bought a dedicated IP that address belongs to Brevo's shared pool, so a listing there is something to raise with Brevo. The blocklist checker shows later whether it has cleared.

In the Bulk sender rules group, both unsubscribe checks should pass on a real campaign, since Brevo adds a List-Unsubscribe header to campaigns and transactional email and supports one-click unsubscribe as RFC 8058 describes it. If they fail on a test send, repeat with route two before you change anything, because Brevo's docs don't say whether test sends carry the header.

The records Brevo asks for

Go to Settings > Senders, Domains, IPs > Domains and add your domain, as Brevo's authentication guide describes. Brevo gives you:

• a Brevo code, a TXT record at the apex of the domain that proves you own it;
• DKIM, either two CNAMEs at brevo1._domainkey and brevo2._domainkey or a single TXT record;
• DMARC, a TXT record at _dmarc. Brevo recommends v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:rua@dmarc.brevo.com.

Brevo recommends the CNAME version of DKIM, since the CNAMEs carry a 2048-bit key and dodge the 255-character limit that can break the 1024-bit TXT record. You only add an SPF record yourself if you send from a dedicated IP.

The same guide warns that Cloudflare's CNAME flattening turns the DKIM CNAME into a TXT record, after which DKIM fails. Brevo's troubleshooting page adds two more traps, DNS hosts that append your domain to the record name a second time and domains with more than one DMARC record or no rua tag. Put brevo1 into the DKIM checker and your domain into the DMARC checker to see whether the records resolve before you spend another test address.

Brevo states that without DMARC, mail to outlook.com, hotmail.com and live.com addresses will be marked as spam or rejected. If the three letters still blur together, this explainer covers how SPF, DKIM and DMARC depend on each other.