If you’re setting up and experimenting with your email setup, there are a few things you don’t want to happen: Accidentally sending a bunch of test emails to real customers, for example. Or killing your sending reputation by sending lots of test mail to nonexistent inboxes. Ouch.
With Sandbox Channels, your safe space for email testing, that doesn’t happen. A Sandbox Channel behaves exactly like a regular Channel—you can send through the API or SMTP, inspect messages, trigger webhooks, and check stats—except the emails never leave Helo.
Sandbox Channels come in handy when you want to:
- Build and test your email integrations: Test your API calls, SMTP setup, and payload formatting without worrying about test emails landing in someone’s inbox.
- Check your templates: Send real messages through the API and inspect them in the Helo dashboard to confirm they are working correctly.
- Test webhooks: Sandbox messages trigger delivery webhooks just like live messages do, so you can build and test your webhook handlers end-to-end.
- Support your QA and staging environments: Point your staging app at a Sandbox Channel so your team can test freely without any risk.
To create your first Sandbox, select the Channel type “Sandbox” when you create a Channel.
Pro tip: You can also create dedicated API credentials that work with your Sandbox Channel. When setting up new API credentials, you can decide to scope them to a single Channel only, allowing you to further isolate your testing environments.