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Free JSON API to instantly check the spam score of your email messages

spamcheck.postmarkapp.com

11–20 of 41 posts

Re: Free JSON API to instantly check the spam score of your email messages

#11
The tool is nice but unfortunately it would miss the key spam score components tied to IP reputation.

AWL (auto-white-list) is the most obvious rule, but many actual Spam Assassin installs include plugins that rely on all kinds of 3rd party service.

Is the IP you are checking against the same as IP used to send your transactional emails?

Re: Free JSON API to instantly check the spam score of your email messages

#12

Would you consider putting some kind of resource on the site for explaining some of the common results? For example, why the Text to Image ratio matters. Also, I've tried a few emails: 1 of them ranked a 1.0, 2 of them a 0.4, but all three times the little white dot was in the same position (at about 2:50, if it were the face of a clock). Not sure if thats a bug or not.

SpamAssassin score could be in range from -1 (best) to 25 (worst). 0.4 and 1.0 is almost the same, so it's normal for white pointer to stay on the same position.

Re: Free JSON API to instantly check the spam score of your email messages

#14
Help me out here: What is the target audience?

1) I don't know your app, but ran SA in the past. You can configure the hell out of it. How is this test setup representable for the (that's the thing you want to archive, I guess) spam filter configuration of the final recipient?

2) Aren't you basically offering a way to ~somewhat easily~ avoid being flagged as spam, even for people with dark glasses and the tendency to sell potent drugs over the internet? I somehow think that you're offering a nice test setup to people that want to 'tune' their unsolicited emails first?

No offense intended, I guess I'm just too negative here? Would love to get feedback on those things nevertheless.

Re: Free JSON API to instantly check the spam score of your email messages

#15

Help me out here: What is the target audience? 1) I don't know your app, but ran SA in the past. You can configure the hell out of it. How is this test setup representable for the (that's the thing you want to archive, I guess) spam filter configuration of the final recipient? 2) Aren't you basically offering a way to ~somewhat easily~ avoid being flagged as spam, even for people with dark glasses and the tendency to…

Your heart is at the right place, I have the same skepticism.

But the bad guys have always been one step ahead of the rest. Let's use the same knowledge and tools, and fight on equal grounds.

Re: Free JSON API to instantly check the spam score of your email messages

#16
post #3

If mail goes to spam while using Postmark, it's almost ALWAYS related to the content. So we built this very simply tool to help you test the headers and contents of your emails to make sure that they're scoring as well as possible to go one step further in avoiding the spam folder! We decided to offer it as a free API to make the world of email just a bit better. We also built a simple single-page scoring tool for an…

This is great — now I can test my spamminess without needing to have an expert look at it first :) Update: would be nice to see a legend with the whole scale ratings possible.

The scale is actually just the SpamAssassin score. Usually anything over 5 can cause delivery problems as the SpamAssassin daemon will mark it as spam. keep in mind though that this is configurable and other people's servers can set a different value. but from my experience, five seems to be the average.

Re: Free JSON API to instantly check the spam score of your email messages

#18

Help me out here: What is the target audience? 1) I don't know your app, but ran SA in the past. You can configure the hell out of it. How is this test setup representable for the (that's the thing you want to archive, I guess) spam filter configuration of the final recipient? 2) Aren't you basically offering a way to ~somewhat easily~ avoid being flagged as spam, even for people with dark glasses and the tendency to…

Hey Benjamin,

1) This test is representative of our system. I realize that other systems can be set up different with different settings. given that users of the Postmark app send email through us, they might be interested to see what we might consider as spam.

2) The thing is that there are a lot of tests that spamd does that they can't defeat, even if they're aware of them. security by obscurity isn't really how spamd works anyway :)

and no, you're not at all negative. by all means, please feedback at us :)

Re: Free JSON API to instantly check the spam score of your email messages

#19
post #5

Very cool guys, thanks for providing this. Would love to see some stats along with the service over time.

what kind of stats would you be interested in seeing? how often people's tests result in spam vs ham scores?

because while I can't see what people are testing, given that it's friday afternoon, I'm betting there's a lot of "asdfasdf" going on :)

Re: Free JSON API to instantly check the spam score of your email messages

#20

If mail goes to spam while using Postmark, it's almost ALWAYS related to the content. So we built this very simply tool to help you test the headers and contents of your emails to make sure that they're scoring as well as possible to go one step further in avoiding the spam folder! We decided to offer it as a free API to make the world of email just a bit better. We also built a simple single-page scoring tool for an…

The documentation page says:

  > Postmark's spam API is a mostly RESTfull interface to the Spam filter
  > tool SpamAssassin.
  ...
  > This is free to use and may be updated, removed or changed at any time.
If there's nothing particularly proprietary about the setup, it'd be great to open source it and release it as a public Amazon EC2 AMI. That way, others can play around and tweak it and it would remove the dependency on a third-party service of uncertain longevity.
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