Send Emails with HubSpot Developer Account — Do This
HubSpot developer accounts are full of benefits. There are additional developer account specific requirements, processes, and settings that regular accounts do not require. Likely leaving some head scratching.
HubSpot developer test account benefits to you:
While it is tempting to forgo the dev account and work in a production sandbox (to just get the thing working), there are many benefits (to you as the developer) of learning the ins & outs of a developer specific account like growing your client-base, marketplace potential, and a better understanding of the ecosystem — making you a better, more valuable resource.
There are of course are benefits to not working in the production environment: Testing apps and integrations without affecting any real HubSpot data and you know you just shouldn’t risk it.
Working in a HubSpot developer test account:
If you are a developer working in Hubspot and are leveraging a developer account, you know there are a lot of developer specific setups and gotchas that will leave you scratching your head and spending a lot of time troubleshooting ghosts.
Here is one that I’ve found to be a major p.i.t.a. and why you are here — emails not being sent from a HubSpot developer account — like when attempting to create something like a membership subscription.
- Checking the contact record you see a vague error message like this:
DO THIS:
Must Create Users In Your Developer Test Account In Order For HubSpot Developer Account Emails to Send. This means anyone you want to have test your feature or functionality, you will need to add them as a User (and the specific email they will test with) in your HubSpot Developer Account.
Additional items worth reading for context:
1. Upgrading your account won’t fix it
Don’t stress, email sending is not broken and you do not need to upgrade (upgrading may take you out of the developer full access)
2. Read the docs
“Read the docs” — we hear it all time. There is just a ton of documentation and most of the functional details are buried across scatter-town. Great for their SEO, bad for trying to get something to work as expected.
3. Email Sending from a Developer Account
From Hubspot documentation:
Developer test accounts
Within app developer accounts, you can create developer test accounts to test apps and integrations without affecting any real HubSpot data. Developer test accounts do not mirror production accounts, but are instead free HubSpot accounts with access to a 90-day trial of many enterprise features, with the following limitations:
• Marketing Hub: you can only send marketing emails to addresses of users who you’ve added to your developer test account.
4. Add test email accounts as Users
- Navigate: Gear Icon > Account Setup > Users & Teams > Create User
- For new test user account, seat and permission sets not required/needed for this. Treat them like a typical user of the functionality you are wanting to test/implement
5. Remove previous test accounts from Contacts
- Navigate Top-Left: Contact > User Row > Delete User
6. Re-test the sign-up subscription
- Submit the form as the test email account
Example:
- you create a page with a membership requirement
- you open an incognito window, try to access the page and get sent to the login page (there are steps to having the self-registration show up on the login system page — detailed in a future post. Until then, google search “HubSpot SSO membership self signup” — does not require SSO, it’s just buried there)
- using a testing email account, you submit the registration
- check contact record of the newly submitted test account and verify the email has gone through
- check the inbox of the submitted registered account to verify successful delivery
Have questions? Hit me up, happy to share what I know.
CR Rollyson is a Digital User Experience & Web Manager for a S&P 500 Fintech company and is the COO of Side Role, a marketing team in Charlotte North Carolina partnering with In-house Teams & Agencies, Non-profits, and Start-Ups. Learn more about Side Role here.
