As companies scale, email and SMS testing transcends from being a QA problem to one which implicates security, compliance, and governance too.
Companies in a range of industries, including finance, healthcare, and education, must adhere to strict regulations protecting their customers’ data privacy, particularly where emails and SMS are used to convey sensitive information, enforce access controls, or confirm regulated actions.
Some laws you might have to abide by:
| Law | Obligation |
|---|---|
| GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) | Organisations must implement “appropriate technical and organisational measures” to protect personal data, including email addresses and phone numbers. Emails or SMS messages used for authentication or account access can form part of the security boundary protecting that data. |
| PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation) | PECR governs electronic communications and places requirements on how/why organisations send emails and SMS. Automated messaging must behave consistently with its declared purpose, particularly when distinguishing between service and marketing communications. |
| PSD2 (Payment Services Directive 2) | In financial services, PSD2 requires strong customer authentication, where email or SMS is used to deliver one-time passcodes or authentication links, and the behaviour of those messages becomes part of a regulated security control. |
| HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) | In the United States, HIPAA sets standards for the protection of patient health information. Emails or SMS messages that enable access to healthcare systems, or that relate to patient accounts, must be safeguarded against unauthorised access or misuse. |
While the specifics vary by jurisdiction and sector, a common theme runs through these frameworks: when messaging is used to protect access, confirm identity, or communicate sensitive information, it must be handled with appropriate care and control.
Email and SMS as security controls
In regulated environments, email and SMS are often part of the mechanism a system uses to enforce security, e.g, verification emails, one-time passcodes (OTPs), and confirmations of regulated actions (such as payments or record changes).
This means that if a verification link does not expire correctly, if an OTP can be reused, or if a message is sent to the wrong recipient, the system’s security assumptions are weakened.
Why test environments matter for compliance
Some of the risk around email and SMS actually comes from how those systems are tested, rather than the systems themselves.
Although considered common practice, messy workarounds (like using shared inboxes for testing, and sending test messages to real email addresses or phone numbers) introduce their own compliance concerns, particularly in regulated industries. This is because messaging in test environments, when not governed sufficiently, poses a risk of unintended data exposure, unclear data retention, and a lack of auditability around who accessed what and when.
Considerations for messaging systems
As email and SMS shift into the scope of security and compliance, organisations typically need to define clearer rules around them, such as:
- policies on what data may appear in test messages
- retention limits
- separation between environments (development, staging, production)
- access controls determining who can view messages
- audit trails for message access and activity
These concerns reflect a broader shift in how messaging is viewed: from what was once an incidental byproduct of an app to now a crucial component.
Why tooling matters for compliant email and SMS testing
All of the considerations above place real constraints on how email and SMS testing can be done safely in regulated environments.
Manual approaches and informal testing practices struggle to meet these requirements at scale, making it difficult to control access, enforce policies, or provide audit-worthy evidence of compliance among other issues. Hence, many companies who employ more sophisticated testing protocols opt to use specific tools.
Tools like Mailosaur are designed to support automated testing of email and SMS in a way that aligns with security, compliance, and governance needs. Rather than relying on real inboxes or phone numbers, teams can route messages in non-production environments to controlled destinations, retrieve them programmatically, and validate their behaviour as part of automated test suites.
Crucially, this allows teams to:
- test authentication and verification workflows without exposing real user data
- validate security-relevant behaviour such as expiry, single-use rules, and correct triggering
- apply role-based access control and team-based permissions
- define and enforce retention policies for test messages
- produce repeatable, auditable evidence of how messaging behaves across releases
Used in this way, tools like Mailosaur are not simply about testing more efficiently, they help organisations demonstrate control, reduce risk, and ensure that critical communication flows behave correctly long before they reach real users.
Overall, security, governance and compliance are key considerations when it comes to your product’s messaging and how to test it, especially as the remit of email and SMS continues to expand into verification and access. As such, awareness of your obligations when it comes to privacy should be a top priority across not only Security and Compliance teams, but Quality Assurance and DevOps too.