Email Test for SPAM: Everything You Need to Know

When you send mass cold emails, it’s important to make sure they are not going straight to the SPAM folder. There are a lot of reasons for that – your message might be too long, include excessive images or links, contain “trigger” words, have been marked as SPAM by the recipients, or your email address might be on a blacklist.

Regardless of why this happens, being unable to reach the inbox is frustrating! It’s easy to get discouraged by all of the problems that come with low email deliverability.

Luckily, there are solutions! One of the best things you can do is implement a regular email SPAM check as a part of your sequence setup process. Let’s figure out what this means and how to do that (+ recommended SPAM checking software).

What does an email SPAM check mean?

Wasting hours of precious time checking SPAM emails manually to sort through the inbox is something many people have struggled with until recently. As email service providers become smarter and their rules – stricter, the percentage of email that is SPAM keeps decreasing. According to Statista, it currently accounts for 28.5% of email traffic, down from 59.8% in 2016.

However, nothing is perfect and many legit marketing and sales emails can mistakenly be marked as SPAM by the providers. To make sure your business correspondence gets through, you should test email for SPAM before you launch the campaign.

We’ll get to the details later, but, simply put, this gives you an understanding of any potential issues with your email, domain, or IP that might lead to poor deliverability and get your messages flagged as SPAM.

Why is it important?

Your business can’t reach its full potential if your emails are getting flagged as SPAM by the recipients’ email providers. An email test will tell you whether or not your email will be delivered successfully so that you can ensure your message gets seen by everyone who needs to read it!

In other words, if you don’t do any email SPAM testing, you will be sending out messages without knowing if they’ll actually get through. And if they don’t get through, then that means you’re wasting time and money on sending things that won’t reach their intended audience.

How to test my email for SPAM?

“How do I test my email for SPAM,” you ask? There are two ways to do that – manually and automatically, using an email SPAM checker tool.

In the first case, to find out if your email is going to be delivered to the inbox or not, just send it to someone you know (or create a disposable “burner” email account) and see where it lands. This is a quick and easy way to take the guesswork out of the process. Yet, this won’t help you understand what’s exactly wrong with your email.

The second option is to use a dedicated SPAM test tool. Aside from offering a better, automated approach to email SPAM test, it will also provide a detailed breakdown of the existing issues and tips to fix them.

Let’s take a look at a few examples of free email SPAM checker tools you can use.

How do you check domain SPAM reputation?

Just like your email address, the domain and IP address it’s tied to might be exposed to certain SPAM and deliverability problems. So, in addition to using a SPAM test service, make sure to check your domain reputation as well.

One trusted free SPAM checker you can use for this purpose is MxToolbox. 

It can help you conduct an IP address SPAM check. In addition to that, it will run diagnostics also referred to as “SMTP SPAM check” by connecting to your mail server via SMTP, verifying if the server has a reverse DNS record, and measuring its response times.  

Yet, there’s more to consider when it comes to deliverability than the technical aspects. Let’s talk about how to send cold email marketing campaigns that reach the inbox.

• Mail-tester.com is by far the most popular newsletter SPAM checker on the market. 
• Glock Apps is another commonly known SPAM checker website that offers a more complex solution with a bunch of tools.
• Kickbox also offers a few deliverability tools, including a few other solutions from list verification to consulting.

Generally speaking, any email marketing SPAM checker works in a similar way. First, it provides you with a unique email address to send your message to. Once you do that, the email address SPAM checker will analyze and rate it against several criteria, which might include blacklists, authentication, message content, and links. In the report, you can also see what can be improved and act accordingly.

How to send cold email marketing letters without SPAM issues?

The best way to make sure your emails don’t qualify as SPAM is to use double opt-in, thus emailing only people who voluntarily agree to receive your correspondence. Yet, in the current business environment, it’s very unlikely that you never reach out to a potential prospect, partner, investor, or candidate. 

First, let’s talk about how to avoid sending SPAM. It’s pretty easy – just make sure that the emails you send don’t qualify as such, either legally or ethically. This means no harmful or fraudulent content (or something that may be qualified as such), only targeted and valuable business messages that comply with the CAN-SPAM Act and other regulations.

The question of how to avoid emails going to SPAM in Gmail or any other email provider is a bit more complex. Mostly, it’s regulated by the SPAM filtering rules.

SPAM filters best practices

Here are some email marketing tips for avoiding SPAM folder

• Ensure proper email account setup and authentication. A part of this step is also to check domain SPAM reputation (at least every once in a while).
• Carefully pick the email addresses you will be sending your messages to. Always run a basic validation to check email address for SPAM traps. For this purpose, try to avoid group emails like team@company.com or sales@company.com as well as free Gmail accounts.
• Double-check your email copy to exclude any “trigger” words that might be raising red flags for email service providers. You can find an exhaustive SPAM phrase list just by running a quick search on Google.
• Email content in a general is very important too – make sure to maintain a healthy image/text ratio, avoid links and large attachments, format your text properly (without heavy HTML elements).
• Before you hit “send”, check SPAM rating of your email and proper account authentication.
• Track your metrics – keep the bounce rate below 5% and make sure there’s at least some engagement (opens/replies) with your emails.

How to send bulk emails without getting blacklisted?

Now that you know how to send cold email marketing without SPAM issues, let’s talk about blacklists.

A blacklist is basically an email SPAM database that contains IP addresses and domains that have been known for sending out harmful or unwanted messages. There are a few such lists that are used by email service providers (ESPs) as one of the reasons to reject your emails from entering the prospect’s inbox.

You can get off the blacklist either by reaching out to the admins and proving that you’re a legitimate sender or will remove your domain automatically after some time.

But how to send bulk emails without getting blacklisted in the first place? The short answer is: don’t SPAM!

This means following the SPAM filter best practices to avoid raising any red flags. 

Wrapping up

If you’ve hit the wall called “my company email goes to SPAM,” don’t get discouraged! There are many ways to fix it and restore your sender reputation.

Picking a reliable site SPAM checker and conducting all the necessary tests is a good way to prevent any issues. 

Another solution would be to warm up your email. This can be done by automatically sending emails to the pool of reliable accounts and interacting with them thus sending positive signals to email service providers.