Emailcenter offer a free email marketing spam content checker that scores your email against spam filter rules.
The checker looks at the following characteristics in your email marketing campaign:
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Content and phrases used in the email
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HTML tags and styles used
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Header information such as ‘From’ address and subject line
Upon running the check you will be presented with a score and a list of reasons why the score was generated. If you score under 3 your email should cope fine against most spam filters, between 3 and 5 is problematic while anything over 5 is almost certainly going to get trapped as spam.
Maxemail users can access a spam checker from the Maxemail interface. Alternatively anyone else involved in email marketing can register for access to the free spam content checker here
What are the key spam characteristics the tool highlights?
Phrases
If your email is loaded with spammy phrases such ‘Free’ or ‘Offers’ the tool will highlight these for you. Some industries such as finance will see more issues here than most due to their standard terms for their products being the same as words used by spammers who offer loans and financing.
HTML errors
Filters don’t look too kindly on email marketing messages with invalid HTML code. This might be incorrectly defined colours such as #FFF instead of #FFFFFF.
Junk code and images
It is important to minimize the amount of HTML tags that you use. Filters look at the ratio of text copy to images and HTML tags. Too many images or tags suggest that it could be spam.
Blacklists
The filter looks at the major IP blacklists to see if the server that sent the email marketing campaign is on any of these blacklists. This often gives a particularly high score that would cause the email to be junked.
From address
As many spammers use a false address to send email from this is flagged as high importance by the filter. Indeed examples of where it may be picked up as spam would be if the address has lots of numbers in.
Subject line
Any spam phrases included in the subject line tend to have a much higher importance than if they were simply in the body text.
Unsubscribe text
Even if you are being a good permission marketer and providing an opt-out link this can actually give you a higher spam score than if you do not have an opt-out option. This is no excuse not to include an opt-out link though – simply experiment with how you phrase the opt-out statement to overcome the filters rules.
Missing headers and MIME parts
A badly formed email will generally get rejected by the filter. This would include missing dates in the headers or incorrectly formatted MIME boundaries.