Overview

Web application journeys often involve emails being triggered and sent to users’ mailboxes, such as an email verification after account creation, an email sent to reset forgotten passwords, an email sent to notify order confirmation, or an email confirmation after contact form submission.

Maintaining a great user experience on your website includes ensuring that your application’s email mechanisms are working properly.

Create an email variable

To add an email variable called EMAIL:

1. Click Variables and select Email from the dropdown menu.
2. Click Add Variable to make the variable available for you to use when you start recording.

The email variable generates a unique mailbox maintained by Datadog at every test execution, which enables your browser tests to run without conflicts.

Record steps

Once you have created an email variable, you can confirm the email was sent correctly after an in-app trigger.

Click Start Recording and record all of the steps leading up to the email being triggered with your email variable. Click the hand icon in a variable to inject its value into the text input of a form or field.

After recording your steps to complete the form, click the Sign Up button to trigger an email notification. An email tailored to this recording session is sent to the Datadog mailbox, for example, 838-n3q-q2y.6238933596@synthetics.dtdg.co.

Confirm the email was sent

To confirm that the email was sent, click Assertion and select Test that an email was received. To ensure your email follows specific guidelines for content, you can add additional verifications on the subject and body.

In this example, the assertion is successful if the email subject is Welcome to Shopist!, the body contains the sentence Your verification code is..., and the verification code matches the \d{1,6} regex pattern.

Navigate through links in an email

To have your browser test navigate through links inside sent emails:

1. Click Navigation and select Go to email and click link. Click Next.
2. The email containing the links you want to test appears in the inbox. Click Next.
3. Select the link you want your browser test to navigate to. The iframe’s or pop-up’s URL immediately updates to the specified link. Click Save Navigation Step.
4. The iframe redirects to the associated page URL. Continue recording your steps.

In this example, the browser test looks into the Welcome to Shopist email, clicks the Verify your email by clicking here link, and confirms the user registration mechanism is working as expected.

As the final step to your browser test, create an assertion to confirm that the div content triggers the proper account verification. For example, the page contains Your account is now verified.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Learn about steps for browser testsDOCUMENTATION Configure advanced options for stepsDOCUMENTATION