
Test the Spammyness of your Emails - shawndumas
https://www.mail-tester.com/
======
Dachande663
I've used Postmark's JSON API to test spam-ratings of emails for years. Can't
recommend enough.

[http://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/](http://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/)

~~~
ejo3
Very interesting. This could be a good way to preflight your emails
automatically before you send them. Thanks.

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exratione
Since you absolutely have to run everything you plan on sending to a mailing
list via spamassassin beforehand, mail-tester.com is a great tool. It saves
the annoying work of cobbling together a spamassassin test script and
integrating it into your workflow, and gives you a bunch of other checks while
you're at it.

Spamassassin is half of the bane of my life when it comes to maintaining
deliverability on a scientific mailing list:

[https://www.exratione.com/2015/08/spamassassin-is-an-
inadequ...](https://www.exratione.com/2015/08/spamassassin-is-an-inadequate-
technology/)

It stops being a useful tool and starts being a mode of censorship that is in
effect controlled by the people who practice fraud and abuse. It is very
annoying to find all sorts of things that effectively can't be discussed by
mail in a list: specific drugs and technical terms used in research, any
research discussion or published research that uses long technical words in
close proximity, fundraising for research, and so on and so forth. Every
newsletter to the opt-in, well-gardened list becomes a little minefield of
self-censorship as you go through multiple iterations with spamassassin,
weeding out and rewording things.

It is all very trying. One has to think that there's a better way.

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teekert
Nice, I have used this service before (along with
[http://mxtoolbox.com/](http://mxtoolbox.com/) and
[http://www.checktls.com/](http://www.checktls.com/)), I'm up to 9/10 now for
my private mail server (on Digital Ocean), still working on getting DKIM to
work.

But, even scoring 9/10, I still have a lot of trouble sending mail to people
on hotmail/live/outlook. I have contacted Microsoft and after getting the
advice to not send bulk mails (I don't) a couple of times, I finally got a
human to respond. This person admitted that their spam filter is an outsourced
black box over which they have no influence. I should try to use proper
formatting and hope for the best...

So I don't know how useful this score is in the real world.

Edit (some more mail server pain): The first mail I sent from my own server
was a mail to all my friends informing them of my new email address. at that
time I didn't have spf configured and used a self signed cert. So I would be
7/10\. All Yahoo contacts answered me that I was permanently banned. None of
them ever receive any of my mails.

~~~
hobarrera
I had 10/10 during years, yet outlook would block emails from one of my
domains - even if I was replying to an incoming email!!

Microsoft seems to have lots of secret rules, blocked IPs and other stuff that
nobody's really figured out.

I did manage to contact them one, I got white-listed, and email went through.
But only for a few months, and then it went back to being silently dropped
again. It was only for a particular domain. Other domains on the same host has
no issues.

I had to move the client in question to Fastmail, since there seemed to be no
way to figure out how to please MS, and my client had lost several big sales
due to documentation being silently dropped. Fastmail deals with it somehow. I
guess they have some human contact with some influence in MS anyway, being
large as they are.

~~~
teekert
Yes, that is the worst thing about it, there is no reporting of any kind, no
errors in my logs, and not my email getting into a spam folder at outlook.com.
If it would be in a spam folder my relatives could un-spam it, if I got an
error message, I could act on it. In stead, some emails go through, some don't
with no indication on either side what the system choose.

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ftio
Discovered that I hadn't setup DKIM for my Google Apps domains, nor had I
realized how easy it is to do it:
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/174124?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/174124?hl=en)

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mike-cardwell
Just ran this service through
[https://emailprivacytester.com/](https://emailprivacytester.com/) \- The
mail-tester.com results page popped up a javascript alert injected by
emailprivacytester.com which proves that the content of email is not being
properly escaped in some manner at mail-tester.com before being displayed.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
That's not ideal, but is also probably not a big deal in this case. There's no
sensitive information to be stolen off the page here, and the only person
who's going to see it is the attacker.

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alexggordon
This is cool. I like how simple it is. Also, I just learned about SPF records
from this. I didn't realize there was a DNS related[0] mechanism of preventing
spam. Kinda neat.

As an alternative to this, if you'd like a little finer grained information
about it spam filters from specific companies, Litmus (I'm not affiliated) has
a really cool spam-test[1] that actually tests it against all major spam
filters (Google, Yahoo, etc) instead of testing it against spam lists like
this does.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework)

[1] [https://litmus.com/spam-filter-tests](https://litmus.com/spam-filter-
tests)

~~~
aianus
DKIM is better (SPF doesn't prevent, for example, Amazon SES impersonating you
and sending out unauthorized email on your behalf)

~~~
noinsight
Neither actually prevents anything because it's up to the recipient ('s
server) to apply whatever scrutiny they feel like.

~~~
hobarrera
DMARC actually specifies exactly what the recipient should test and what they
should to with the email.

They can easily ignore DMARC records, but at least you're still telling them
what to do with failing email.

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username223
So... it's a reinforcement learning tool for spammers?

~~~
Disruptive_Dave
I've used it (amongst other email testing tools) for quite some time now to
validate the thousands of emails we send each week for BoomboxFM[1]. And none
of those emails are "spam". Email is the delivery system for our product, and
trust me, it sucks trying to figure out why people who 100% want your emails
don't always get them straight to their inbox. Particularly with Gmail.

[1] [http://www.boombox.fm/](http://www.boombox.fm/)

~~~
username223
I know all about the nuisance of BigCorp dumping my (non-commercial, mind you)
email into the spam folder for obscure reasons, but whatever company you're
trying to push, you miss the point. A web service to say "this is what most
spam filters will do to your email" is just a training signal for spammers.
That is, unless they are smart enough to implement an amazing meta-spam
filter.

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leesalminen
Are there plans for an API (paid or otherwise)?

My SaaS has a built in marketing tool that allows for bulk email sending. I
constantly run into an issue where customers have an image from a designer,
and want to embed that image as the entire content of the email. Of course,
that's flagged as spam. I would love to show users a spam score before they
blast away.

~~~
inanutshellus
Am I the only person out there that doesn't display images in email by
default? I can't tell you the number of emails I've gotten--from companies I'm
a big fan of and I've agreed to receive mail from--with enticing subject lines
that contain no content. Just images.

Case in point is REI. A couple weeks ago I spent several hundred bucks on
camping gear from one of their competitors and found out later they'd had an
enticing discount linked in one of their image-only emails. I guess we both
lost out.

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werber
Is anyone else blocked by CASA-CBLPLUS? It's apparently the China Anti-Spam
Alliance, I'm very confused.

~~~
tokenizerrr
My mail got listed there as well, even though I send everything through
google's smtp servers with my own domain name.

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rwmj
That revealed a configuration problem in my server. The hostname was set to
some an old domain name (which I no longer own or control). Who checks their
hostname? Not me obviously. This probably explains why some email was being
filtered to spam by gmail. Fixed, and I'm now getting 9/10.

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hobarrera
10/10 is pretty easy to reach if you sit down one afternoon and do your
homework (I was a newbie to email when I used this, and opensmtpd could not
have been simpler!).

It really makes a huge difference getting past spam filters everywhere, so I
can't recommend this website enough!

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sarreph
How bizarre, was looking for one of these just last week because I'm starting
to worry that my email signature's image tags are causing issues for some
recipients.

Can't recommend these kind of tools enough!

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pmx
I've used mail-tester in the past and had great results with it. I highly
recommend it!

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GnarfGnarf
My email fails DKIM in half the tests, and succeeds in the other half. Sigh...

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chmike
I don't get it. What am I suppose to do ?

~~~
mike-cardwell
View the front page. It will show you an email address which looks something
like "web-ONhx3B@mail-tester.com" which is unique to you. Send an email to
that address then click the "Check your score" button. It will rate the email
which it received from you and point out any configuration problems.

~~~
chmike
Thanks for the help. I finally succeeded. I'm missing spf and dkim. Not easy
to define.

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jjuhl
Useful tool, sure. But really, if you have to test, then yes, your mail is
probably spam that noone cares for.

~~~
skrebbel
You clearly never made an app that sends opt-in emails (think activity
notifications, reminders, whatever). Unless you know the exact right
incantations, 3% of these mails _will_ end up in Gmail's spam folder. This
directly results in 3% unhappy users. They'll _never_ consider blaming Gmail
instead of you.

~~~
_delirium
Part of the problem with those is that a lot of companies (including big ones)
have started sending notification and "what's happening" updates them
_without_ an opt-in, which causes users to think they're spammy and mark them
as such. LinkedIn and Twitter are particularly big offenders here, but there
are a lot of others. Twitter even likes to periodically invent new kinds of
email notifications and newsletters, and opt you in to them by default.

Gmail might be making this a little better by introducing a middle ground,
moving those kinds of emails out of the Inbox into either the "Social" or
"Promotions" boxes, where they're less likely to be marked as spam (although
probably also less likely to be seen).

