The spam check is a tool that you can use to identify any potential spam-sensitive issues within your campaigns and automation emails before sending them to your contacts.
In this article:
- What is a spam check?
- How concerned should you be if you fail the Spam check?
- Common Spam check error messages.
What is a spam check?
We perform a spam check for every campaign and automation email you create. The tool scans the content of your message and displays the results under 'Summary' and in the settings of your email.
If the check does not reveal any issues, you will see a green checkmark. Otherwise, you will receive a notification indicating what may impact the deliverability of your email. The underlying tool we use at MailBlue for this purpose is SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin is a popular 'open source' tool that checks messages for potential spam. We scan the message based on the same set of rules they use.
The spam check does not prevent the email from being sent. It simply highlights potential issues to be aware of. Only the content of the message is examined. For example, it does not take into account the sending reputation of your domain. Therefore, the result does not guarantee that your email will never end up in spam.
How concerned should you be if you fail the spam check?
Not very concerned. The spam check only indicates potential issues. In other words, if you follow the guidelines, such as maintaining a clean list and sending valuable content, you don't need to worry if you occasionally receive a few points on the spam check. These rules are suggestions to guide you in the right direction; they are not indicators of success or failure.
Common spam check error messages
Below is a list of the most common spam check error messages that our customers encounter, and what you can do to resolve them.
| Error Message | Solution |
|
Reference to a muscle relaxant |
Look for the words soma, cycl (cyclobenzaprine), flexeril, skelaxin, or zanaflex. |
| Sender's email is a commonly abused end-user email provider | Avoid using free sender email addresses like @gmail, @yahoo. It is better to use a sender address with your own domain. |
| No description available |
Look for words like:
And check if the sender email address is not a free sender email address like @gmail, @yahoo. |
| BODY: No description available | Look for the phrase "Reply to this email ..." |
| BODY: HTML has an incorrect text-to-image ratio | Ignore |
| Body: Message is 10% to 20% HTML obfuscation BODY: Message is 20% to 30% HTML obfuscation |
Ensure the text/image ratio is balanced. The issue is likely due to the content having too many images and very little text. Sometimes this is displayed incorrectly due to the complex mobile responsive code created by the email design page. |
| URI: Uses %-values within the host name of a URL | This can happen if you use a personalization tag like %EMAIL%, which SpamAssassin sometimes flags. You can ignore this as it gets filled in at the time of sending. |
| Earn lots of money! | Remove the words "lucrative" or "profitable" from the email text. |
| Too many tags used in the code |
This is usually a false positive test result. SpamAssassin sees the complex code from our email designer and thinks it is obfuscating the message content. |
| Subject has an exclamation mark and question mark |
Remove '!' and / or '?' from subject lines. |
| BODY: Removal phrase right before a link |
Remove the word 'Here' in 'Unsubscribe Here' at the email footer. |
| Subject contains "your family or your household" |
Avoid using the phrase "your family or your household". |
| Accessing a blocked* URL or obscuring a source. |
This usually happens with custom HTML. Look at the source of the URLs for your images. You probably copied/pasted a cached image from Gmail that originates from googleusercontent.com, which is very spam sensitive. Instead, upload the JPG/PNG to MailBlue and add it to the image manager in campaigns, or host the image on your own domain. |
| Your message contains characteristics similar to those of scammers |
Remove the phrase 'your compensation'. |
| A URI hostname has a long hexadecimal string (6 characters or more). This looks suspicious |
Check for links with long number strings, such as abnormally formatted phone numbers. This can also happen if your account name has a long string of numbers, like 1857105312.activehosted.com. Our Support Team can assist you with changing the account name if this is the case. |
| Your message claims to be a "marketing partner" of the recipient. This is often seen as spam. |
Remove the term 'marketing partner' or 'network partner'. |
| RAW: message contains "best," but without a name |
You opened the message with 'Dear, ..' but no actual first name. This can happen if you use 'Dear, %First Name%' and SpamAssassin does not see a real first name because the personalization tag has not been filled in yet. |
| BODY: contains a tracking ID number |
Look for a very long link or a very long word with hyphens like Bestimmungs-Kraft-Session-2-Recording that trigger this rule. |
| The subject mentions losing weight |
Search the subject line for the phrase "losing kilos / weight" and adjust it. |
| UC_GIBBERISH_OBFU |
Look for a sentence like "condizioni VANTAGGIOSISSIME quello". This is usually a false positive test result due to long words in non-English or non-Dutch language. |
| BODY: HTML: images with 2000-2400 bytes of words |
The message is very short with just a small amount of text. |
| BODY: One-time scam |
Look for 'one-time' or 'scam' or a combination of those words in the campaign content. |
* The term "blocked list" is also known as "blacklist". These two terms are often used interchangeably.