Email Preview Before Sending
When you send an email about a request or to a user, you almost never type it from scratch. You pick a template — Item Available for Pickup, Request Cancelled, and so on — and Aeon does the work of turning that template into a finished message: it looks up the recipient, fills in the subject, and resolves every tag in the body against the actual record (the patron's name, the transaction number, the item title). That filled-in result is the preview, and it appears in the Compose Email dialog the moment you choose a template.
The preview is not a separate "preview mode" you have to switch on. It is the email. Everything you see in the dialog is exactly what will be queued, and every field is editable. You review it, tweak anything that needs tweaking, and send.
- You pick an email template from the Email menu on a request or a user record — Aeon opens Compose Email with the message already filled in. Read it over, then send.
- A template got most of it right but you want to add a sentence or correct a recipient — edit the preview directly before sending.
- You've made edits you regret and want the clean template back — click Reload to regenerate the preview from scratch.
How the preview gets built
Choosing a template — from the Email menu on a request's toolbar, or the Email menu on a user record — opens the Compose Email dialog. Each Email menu lists New Email (a blank message) followed by the templates available for that record type; picking a template is what triggers the preview. While Aeon generates the message you'll see a brief Loading email preview... spinner, then the fields populate:
| Field | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| To | The recipient resolved from the template and the record (for example, the patron's email on request #12345). |
| From | Your library's configured sending address. |
| Subject | The template's subject line, with tags resolved. |
| Message body | The template body, with every tag replaced by real values from the record. |
| Reply-To, CC, BCC | Filled in only if the template specifies them (see below). |
The tag substitution happens on the server: Aeon takes the template, the entity type (Transaction, User, Appointment, and so on), and the record's ID, and produces the finished copy. By the time you see the dialog, there are no unresolved <#...> tags left to surprise the recipient.
By default the dialog shows just To and From. If the template fills in a Reply-To, CC, or BCC value, Aeon automatically expands that section so you can see it. Otherwise it stays collapsed behind a Show CC, BCC, Reply-To toggle — click it any time you want to add one of those yourself. (When the section is open, the same control reads Hide CC, BCC, Reply-To.)
Reviewing and editing the preview
Every field in the dialog is a live input. Before sending you can:
- Fix or change the recipient — edit the To field, or add addresses to CC / BCC.
- Adjust the subject — click into the subject line and type.
- Edit the message — the body is fully editable; add a personal note, remove a paragraph, correct a detail.
- Set a Reply-To — expand the optional fields and fill it in.
Your edits are local to this one email. They don't change the underlying template, and they don't affect the next email you send from the same template.
Reloading to start over
If you've edited the preview and want to discard those changes, click Reload. Aeon regenerates the message from the template, replacing whatever's currently in the fields with a fresh copy.
Reload overwrites the recipient, subject, body, and the optional fields with freshly generated template content. Anything you typed is lost. Use it deliberately — it's there to give you a clean slate, not to refresh in place.
The Reload button only appears when you're working from a template. A blank email has nothing to reload from, so the button is hidden.
Blank emails skip the preview
You can also start a blank email (no template). In that case there's nothing to generate, so Aeon doesn't run a preview — the dialog opens with empty fields (apart from the recipient, when it already knows one) and you write the whole message yourself. Because there's no template behind it, there's no Reload button.
Routing options on the preview
For some request emails, the template is configured to also move the request to a particular status queue when the message goes out — for example, sending the "item ready" email and routing the request to the pickup queue in one step. When that's the case, the dialog shows one or two checkboxes along the bottom:
- Route to {queue name} for the transaction status, and/or
- Route to {queue name} for the photoduplication status.
These are checked according to how the email was launched, and you can toggle them before sending. Routing only happens for request (Transaction) emails whose template has routing configured; for everything else the checkboxes don't appear.
After you send, Aeon tells you whether the routing took effect: you'll see "Email queued and request routed successfully" when it worked, or "Email queued, but routing failed" if the message went out but the request couldn't be moved. A plain "Email queued successfully" means the email is on its way and no routing was requested.
Sending
When the preview looks right, click Send. Aeon validates that To, From, and Subject are all filled — if any is missing you'll get a prompt (for example, "Recipient email is required") and the email won't go out. Once it passes, the message is added to the outgoing email queue with a status of Pending, and you'll see a confirmation toast.
To close the dialog without sending, click Cancel Email.
Send queues the email — it doesn't transmit it on the spot. Aeon's mailer picks up pending messages and delivers them. You can review what's waiting (and resend anything that fails) from the Outgoing Emails queue.
Composing, previewing, and sending email all require the Edit level of the Email permission. With view-only Email access you can see email history, but the Send button in the composer is disabled and the preview endpoint is not available to you.
A couple of things an SME or a screenshot should settle:
- Confirm the From-address behavior: the preview's From comes from the library's configured sending address (LocalInfo / customization keys). Worth confirming with an SME that the From shown in preview matches what recipients actually see.
- Confirm template-launch wording: this page says the composer opens from the Email menu on a request's toolbar and the Email menu on a user record. Confirmed against
request-toolbar.tsxanduser-detail.tsx(both render anEmail-labelledActionDropdownwith a "New Email" item plus templates) — leaving this for a final screenshot check alongside the Composing and Sending Email pages. - Screenshots needed: (1) the Compose Email dialog with a template-filled preview (To/From/Subject/body populated); (2) the same dialog showing the routing checkboxes along the footer.
The full generation metadata — sources, files read, and verifications, i.e. the detail a tool like Claude would need to regenerate this page — is in the HTML comment directly below this callout. When this page has been reviewed and approved, delete both this callout and that comment; a page with no Editor-review callout is one that's done.