What APIs and tools can check email content for spam triggers before sending?
Summary
What email marketers say8Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Litmus shares that their platform provides email testing and deliverability tools, allowing users to preview emails across different email clients and devices. It also includes spam filter testing to identify potential issues that could affect inbox placement.
Marketer from Email Geeks suggests using SendForensics for pre-send testing, which provides content-specific results, including problematic phrases, keywords, and weighted words.
Email marketer from Mailjet discusses A/B testing email campaigns to see what kind of copy is filtered, by trialing content to different users.
Email marketer from GlockApps shares that their platform offers comprehensive spam testing by sending your email to various mailbox providers and providing a report on placement (inbox, spam, promotions tab). It also checks for authentication issues, blacklisting, and content issues, allowing you to identify potential problems before a large-scale send.
Email marketer from EmailOnAcid describes their spam testing tools to see how content is being received by different email providers.
Email marketer from SendForensics explains that their platform does pre-send testing to give content specific results like problematic phrases, keywords, weighted words to identify potential problems before sending emails.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares that Postmark offers a spam check via API: <https://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/>. They also mention GlockApps (<https://glockapps.com/spam-testing/>) for highlighting problematic words and phrases, although they used the email testing feature rather than the API.
Email marketer from ZeroBounce describes their suite of email verification and deliverability tools. They offer spam trap detection, blacklist monitoring, and content analysis to help users identify and resolve potential issues that could impact email deliverability.
What the experts say4Expert opinions
Expert from Word to the Wise stresses the importance of sender reputation and engagement. High engagement rates signal to mailbox providers that recipients find the emails valuable, leading to improved deliverability. Conversely, low engagement or spam complaints negatively impact sender reputation and increase the risk of emails being filtered as spam.
Expert from Email Geeks recommends <http://spamtriggerwords.com> as a definitive source for spam trigger words.
Expert from Spam Resource, Laura Atkins, recommends focusing on legitimate email practices and avoiding 'dirty' words or phrases as a primary strategy for avoiding spam filters. Instead, prioritize obtaining explicit consent, providing easy unsubscribe options, and maintaining clean and engaged lists.
Expert from Word to the Wise emphasizes the critical role of proper email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) in improving deliverability. Ensuring correct setup helps mailbox providers identify legitimate senders and reduces the likelihood of emails being flagged as spam.
What the documentation says5Technical articles
Documentation from Microsoft highlights the anti-spam message headers that are added to inbound emails by Exchange Online Protection (EOP). These headers provide details about the spam filtering process, including the spam confidence level (SCL) and the rules that were triggered. Analyzing these headers can help identify why an email was marked as spam.
Documentation from Postmark explains that their Spam Check API helps identify potential spam issues in email content before sending. It analyzes HTML and plain text content, providing a spam score and highlighting specific rules that are triggered. The API uses SpamAssassin to perform these checks.
Documentation from Apache SpamAssassin details that it is an open-source platform that uses a variety of spam-detection techniques, including content analysis, DNS-based and collaborative filtering databases, and heuristic rules. It analyzes email headers and body to identify spam characteristics.
Documentation from Mailgun describes their Email Validation API, which helps ensure email deliverability by checking for syntax errors, disposable email addresses, and spam traps. While not strictly a content checker, it prevents sending to addresses that are likely to cause deliverability issues.
Documentation from AWS highlights the service for sending bulk email and provides recommendations for best practice for setting up authentication so that messages are less likely to get filtered as spam.