Test the Spammyness of your Emails • Hacker News Board

Re: Test the Spammyness of your Emails

#31

Post by teekert » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 8:03 PM UTC

Nice, I have used this service before (along with http://mxtoolbox.com/ and 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.

Re: Test the Spammyness of your Emails

#32

Post by tokenizerrr » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 8:40 PM UTC

werber wrote: post #21

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

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

Re: Test the Spammyness of your Emails

#33

Post by noinsight » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 10:14 PM UTC

aianus wrote: post #26

alexggordon wrote: post #24

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,…

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

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

Re: Test the Spammyness of your Emails

#34

Post by inanutshellus » Mon, Oct 19, 2015, 1:41 AM UTC

leesalminen wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Test the Spammyness of your Emails

#35

Post by hobarrera » Mon, Oct 19, 2015, 2:35 AM UTC

teekert wrote: post #31

Nice, I have used this service before (along with http://mxtoolbox.com/ and 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…

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.

Re: Test the Spammyness of your Emails

#36

Post by hobarrera » Mon, Oct 19, 2015, 2:36 AM UTC

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!

Re: Test the Spammyness of your Emails

#37

Post by hobarrera » Mon, Oct 19, 2015, 2:38 AM UTC

username223 wrote: post #20

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

It's a tool, which can be used by anyone regardless of intention.

Much like a scalpel can be used to save lives of kill people.

Re: Test the Spammyness of your Emails

#38

Post by hobarrera » Mon, Oct 19, 2015, 2:39 AM UTC

noinsight wrote: post #33

aianus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

Re: Test the Spammyness of your Emails

#39

Post by teekert » Mon, Oct 19, 2015, 9:21 AM UTC

hobarrera wrote: post #35

teekert wrote: post #31

Nice, I have used this service before (along with http://mxtoolbox.com/ and 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…

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 partic…

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.