You can always test your newsletter by sending an email directly from the HTML or TEXT editing forms before creating a campaign.

With this test you can check your hyperlinks and whether some special smart links are correctly applied. 

Tip: add your own administrator email also as a subscriber.

A more complete way to test is the following:

1. Create the campaign.
2. Find your own email in the subscriber list.
3. Under "Actions" click the envelope icon .
4. In the pop-up window select the campaign you want to test and click "Send it".
5. Check your mailbox.
6. Check your summary report. It will be updated. The "Total sent" will show 1. Views, clicks and the email clients report will also be updated.
7. When you are satisfied with the result you can edit and schedule your campaign.

Opt-in forms is an essential tool for building your mailing list and successful email marketing. However, they are frequently exploited by bots and malicious actors, leading to various problems.

In this article we cover the following points:

• Automated bot signups, fake, malicious signups and form spamming.
• Understanding the risks.
• How and why it happens.
• Why you need to protect your opt-in forms.
• Available protection methods in nuevoMailer.
• Best practices: Double opt-in & more.
• Monitoring and automation.

Keywords: opt-in form protection, email deliverability, sender reputation, domain reputation, form spamming, double opt-in, Captcha methods, data protection, monitoring, list cleaning.

You can read the full article here.

Step 1

Create a newsletter with the URL(s) you want to track.

Step 2

Create a campaign that uses the newsletter from Step 1 and a mailing list that includes only your own email as a subscriber.

You can give a name to this campaign like "Signature tracker X".

Step 3

Send this campaign. When you receive the newsletter copy the trackable links and you can use them anywhere you like. Email signatures, banners etc.

Anonymous tracking

You may use "Anonymous tracking" for this campaign. If you do so the only metric you will be able to see is "All clicks". Just the total number without any other details.

if you do not use Anonymous tracking then when you click the "All clicks" metric you will see a detailed click history with date, time and IP and a timeline report. In addition, the clicks will show in your Home page report "Happening now".

Of course the "clicker" will always be your own email.

A step further: friendly URL with .htaccess

This is optional. You can add these two lines in your htaccess file of your domain.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^sig$ https://www.domain.tld/mailer/inc/rdr.php?xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [R=301,L]

https://www.domain.tld/mailer/inc/rdr.php?xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx is the actual tracking link you can use as explained earlier in Step 3. Instead you can use https://www.domain.tld/sig and it will have the same effect. You may replace sig with whatever you prefer.

[R=301,L] may be omitted. 301 means permanent redirect, [L] stands for "last" and means that this is the last rule to be processed.

The problem

Automated email scanners tend to follow all links in a newsletter without of course knowing what these are about.
This results in unintentional opt-outs and complaints from our subscribers.

The solution

Ask for an opt-out reason.
Only a human can complete this process (check a radio button and click the submit button). At least as of 2025 this still works. We will see when AI powered scanners or agents will change that.
You can set your own opt-out reasons in your Sender profile (Goodbye) .

This also gives you valuable insights as to why your subscribers are leaving you. You can see these reasons in your opt-outs report.

Alternatives?

Basically it is the list, global and suppression opt-out links that are one-click actions.
Alternatives to the above are:

1. Redirect the subscriber to the "Subscriber portal" (for a full profile update).
2. Redirect the subscriber to the "Update list preferences" built-in page (for updating lists only).
3. Use opt-out by email instead of opt-out links. Learn more about opt-out by email in the Docs.

Learn more about the different opt-out links you have in nuevoMailer.

Learn more about nuevoMailer safe-tracking mechanisms to improve the accuracy of your campaign reports.