Lets talk about Spamscore
We’ve recently launched an all new version of spamscore inside your email blaster. It’s been completely redesigned and reengineered from the ground upwards, giving you complete visibility in a way never before possible.
So, what is spam score?
Well, wouldn’t it be great if you had a way of knowing how your recipient’s spam filters would react to your send, before sending a single email.
Spam score gives you the ability to do just that, using some really complicated algorithms, wrapped up in a really user friendly interface, spamscore gives you the ability to do this.
Spam score performs thousands of checks on your campaign to help determine it’s spam rating. Improve delivery and help avoid the junk folder.
The tools used to evaluate your send include the following key areas:
- Test inbox placement with: Outlook, Gmail, iCloud and Yahoo.
- Uses the same spam scoring algorithms used by the largest email providers.
- Live query of the 30 largest domain blacklists.
- Content analysis, providing helpful feedback.
- Auto check for broken links and images.
Ok, so that’s spamscore in a nutshell, now lets take a look at some of the key areas and what they mean.
First up, lets take a look at how to get Spamscore to analyse your latest email design.
Simply go to the apps section, click on add more apps and install the app. If you are a Pay As You Go customer, it’s £9.99 or if you are a full monthly subscription customer then it’s completely free of charge.
Ok, so upon launching the app, simply select your email template and then select which sender profile you are intending to send it with.
Spamscore will then run, you’ll see a progress wheel showing you in realtime the checks that it is carrying out.
When spamscore has completed all of the checks, you’ll be presented with the full report page. This page will give you everything you need to know. Each tile will show you the results of a test that has been run, clearly labelled with a pass or a fail.
It’s a pretty comprehensive report...
The first five boxes show us how the main email service providers will view our send and if there are any placement issues that we need to address.
The next box along shows the spam assassin score. Spam Assassin is one of the largest spam filtering services, it’s employed by email service providers all over the world. If you are sending out emails, then you are going to be sending to mailboxes controlled by Spam Assassin.
By clicking on the ‘information’ button top right, we can navigate to the further information page for each tile.
As we can see here, the spam Assassin page gives us a lot of material to work through. This tile alone is a really handy tool for diagnosing just how inbox friendly our mailer is going to be.
It gives us a full breakdown of the Spam Assassin points scoring structure and how our email faired against this.
Next up we have the sender profile verification, this section looks at our sending domain name if we’ve verified it. Again, the info button gives us everything we need to know, including a link to our guide on how to verify your sending domain.
Next up, we have some advice on the best mailbox type to use. Spam filters will mark you down for using a generic send from address such as sales@, so its’ much better to use an address such as jamie@
The next tile shows us spam reports, these are recipients who may have previously logged your send as spam, the Likes of Outlook will record these, store them and mark your future sends down.
Moving along, the next tile shows us any broken links, again, the info button will identify these. Broken links do also carry a spam rating.
The next tile will show us any spam phrases contained with our mailer. If you’ve got phrases inside your mailer that your recipient’s mail server think are spam related, then could pretty much guarantee poor inbox placement.
Spamscore will scan a huge database of known phrases and identify them and the sentence that they are used in. This is a really handy tool for giving you a heads up with your body text.
The next tile looks at the amount of images that we have, versus the amount of text. Many spam filters will penalise a mailer that has more images than text, so by using spamscore, we can quickly check this.
Next up we have blacklists, spamscore will do a quick lookup of the addresses contained within your mailer and let you know if any of these have been backlisted. A blacklist can have quite a negative impact on your delivery rates.
In the last box, Spamscore will run a quick check on your sending domain, many free service providers, such as Yahoo and Gmail will not allow use of their email addresses for commercial email marketing.
Summary.
Ok, so that’s a quick run through of Spamscore. It’s a great tool to help you achieve and maintain great inbox placement – all before you’ve sent a single email.