1. Test for Spam
When you are done creating the email, click the Test Spam button in Juvlon. Juvlon uses SpamAssasin which is an industry leading opensource Spam check software. SpamAssassin comes with a large set of rules which are applied to determine whether an email is spam or not. Most rules are matched against the body or header fields of the message, but SpamAssassin also employs a number of other spam-fighting techniques. The rules are called ‘tests’ in the SpamAssassin documentation. Each test has a score value that will be assigned to a message if it matches the test’s criteria. The scores can be positive or negative, with positive values indicating ‘spam’ and negative ‘ham’ (non-spam messages).
To make it simple for you, we have introduced a green and red colour to the scores. If your score is low, it is shown in green, which means the email has passed the Spam test and in all probability will not be considered as Spam by many email clients.
If there are words that might be considered spammy, or if you email is image heavy you might get a score shown in Red.
2. Create a seed list
Look at the domain report from your past campaigns. Here is a sample top 10 domains report from Juvlon.
This tells you the domains on which the largest chunks of your readers are. Create an account with each of the email service providers. These emails then become your seed list.
When your email is ready, send it to the seed list first. Then check each of the emails accounts to see if the email was delivered in the inbox.
3. Check if the email looks ok
Include in your seed list emails accounts that you can view on your colleagues’ or your mobile phone. Check to see how the email looks on popular browsers and email clients. Check if your email looks ok with images turned off.
Tip: Even if your images are off you can still make the cell look presentable with proper background colours.
Check how your email looks in
- Gmail on Firefox
- Gmail on Internet Explorer
- Gmail on Safari
- Hotmail on Firefox
- Hotmail on Internet Explorer
- Hotmail on Safari etc.
- On an iPhone
- On anAandroid phone etc.
Please note that you should test for spam for every email. This is a moving target. Getting a good (green) spam score does not automatically mean that your email will get delivered to all your readers. For example, if one of your readers who are on Gmail, has marked your earlier email as spam, or has not read your previous emails at all, then it’s likely that even after all the precautions this email does land up in his junk folder.
However, with these simple steps you can ensure that more of your emails will be delivered to the inbox of readers and will be rendered correctly.