In this tutorial I will tell you How to Check the Quality Level of the emails you send from your domain, to check if they are considered SPAM.
Mails that do not reach their destination
Every week I receive some mails that do not reach their destination, and are filtered to SPAM, either at the level of the mail manager itself, or at the level of the server itself. Here is the last one I received yesterday.
Indeed, Hotmail sometimes goes a little too far when it comes to avoiding SPAM, and can sometimes give false positives. But be careful, because it is not the only one. It can also happen with the client application itself, or even with Gmail. That’s why I always recommend checking the SPAM folder periodically, to make sure that no legitimate mail has slipped through.
The best thing to do is to report the false positive to the person responsible for it. In Gmail, for example, by checking the “This is not SPAM” box. As many users do the same, little by little and over time, everything will return to normal.
But what can we do until then, and how can we improve the quality of our emails, to avoid being considered SPAM as much as possible? Well, by improving our score. What score? Let’s see!
Check the quality level of your emails
Nowadays we have several tools that allow us to do this, but my favourite is undoubtedly Mail Tester, from the people at MailPoet.
It is a very easy to use tool, and it is also free, so you can’t ask for more. The homepage could not be simpler and more explanatory.
It gives you a random email address, to which you must send a random email. You can do this in many ways, but the most typical are three alternatives:
- From your mail manager: Send a normal email to that address, with the subject and text of your choice.
- From your mailing manager: Send a “test” email of your newsletter. All tools (MailChimp, MailPoet, MailRelay, etc.) have this option.
- From your website: Send an email from your website through a form or a CMS like WordPress.
As the first two options have no secret, let’s follow this example with the third option. We are going to send an email from WordPress. There are many ways to do that, but one of the easiest and fastest is to create a new user with that email. This way, you will receive a confirmation email with your password.
Above all, make sure you have the option “Send notice to user” activated, because that is precisely what it is all about. Sending the new user an email with information about their account. It is also important to give them a subscriber role. Don’t give them any more privileges, just in case.
Then, wait a few seconds, to make sure the email arrives (in the meantime we can take the opportunity to delete the test user), and then go back to Mail Tester, and click on the blue button.
We waited a few seconds, and here is my score:
Otherwise, you’re going to see something like this:
With this gloomy and pessimistic message (with rain included) Mail Tester tells us that our mail will most probably not arrive at its destination. Oh, disappointment! What do we do now?
How to prevent your emails from going to SPAM
Well, if you have failed, don’t worry, because everything has a solution in this world. In fact, the tool itself tells us why we have failed, and what we can improve. And it does so in a detailed and itemised way.
As you can see, there are several criteria that make up this note, and we can expand on each of these points, to find out what the problem is, and how to solve it. The five categories are:
- Message
- SpammAssassin Score
- Permissions
- Message body
- Blacklists
So, going back to the email I received, what you should do is to look at these points and see the source of the problem. Then we will see if the “fault” lies with the mail server, the hosting, the domain, the CMS, or the email itself. From here, fixing each of these points is material for another tutorial. Or for several of them. Or even an entire course, as each problem requires a very different solution.
Summary and conclusion
Sometimes, our emails may not reach their destination because they are considered SPAM, even though they are not. In that case, we should check our score, and detect where we are losing points.
Tools like Mail Tester will help us to know our points to improve in an easy and simple way, and even tell us how to improve.
We give you more interesting links to continue learning;
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