About
When creating an email, Insightly Marketing will perform a spam check to identify any possible spam threats contained in the email. If spam threats are located, one or more error will be displayed to indicate the issue with the email that could result in the email being considered spam.
For more information about avoiding a spam filter Insightly's Email Deliverability 101 webinar can be reviewed.
In This Article
How Does it Work?
Spam check is a tool within Insightly Marketing that is utilized when creating an email via the Designer Tool. Spam Check allows users to identify areas in an email that could be considered spam prior to sending the email to recipients. Insightly Marketing scans the content of an email (including the subject line) and displays any potential spam errors with an associated error value. If the total sum of error values meet or exceed five, Insightly Marketing will prevent the email from being sent.
Sender Score
A sender score (or sending reputation) is determined by how mailbox providers judge received mail content and is driven by how recipients of the mail are reacting to the messages. If emails being sent generate a large amount of spam complaints, a sender score can worsen and this will make future messages difficult to be delivered to an inbox. Contrarily, if recipients are engaging positively with emails, the sender score will be stronger and messages will therefore be more likely to be delivered to an inbox.
While there is no singular score that all email providers use, the following tools can be used to review and track a sender score:
- Senderscore.org - measures based off a 0-100 scale, numbers are calculated on a rolling 30-day average and displays where an IP address ranks against other IP addresses.
- Barracudacentral - provides both IP and domain reputation lookup.
- TrustedSource - run by McAfee and provides information on both a domain's email and web reputations as well as affiliations, domain name system (DNS), and mail server information.
- Google Postmaster Tools - allows for users to track data on high volume sending into Gmail. Includes information such as IP reputation, domain reputation, Gmail delivery errors, and more.
- Microsoft SNDS - provides insight into data points such as an IP's reputation, how many Microsoft spam traps are being delivered to, and a spam compliant rate.
Common Spam Errors
While there are many combinations of errors that are possible to receive, displayed below are errors and the correlating information that are most common.
Error | Information |
Refers to a muscle relaxant | Review for the phrases soma, cycl (cyclobenzaprine), flexeril, skelaxin, or zanaflex. |
Sender email is commonly abused end user mail provider | Do not use a Freemail provider such as @gmail, or @yahoo. |
No description available | Look for phrases such as:
|
BODY: No description available | Review for the phrase "Reply to this email...". |
BODY: HTML has a low ratio of test to image area | This error can be disregarded entirely. |
BODY: Message is 10% to 20% HTML obfuscation. BODY: Message is 20% to 30% HTML obfuscation. | Balance image and text ratio. This error is likely due to the content containing too many images and very little text. At times, this error is a false positive due to the code generated by the Designer Tool. |
URI: Uses %-escapes inside a URL's hostname | This can occur if a merge field is being utilized; these can at times, be flagged during the spam check. This error can be disregarded entirely as the merge field will be populated at send time. |
relaxant Make lots of money! | Remove "lucrative" and/or "profitable" from the email text. |
You use too many tags in your code | This is generally a false positive due to the spam check seeing complex code within the Designer Tool and believing that it is obscuring content. |
Subject has exclamation mark and question mark | Remove "!" and/or "?" from the subject line. |
Subject contains "Your Family" | Remove the phrase "Your Family". |
Accessing a blacklisted URL or obscuring source of | Commonly, this occurs with the use of custom HTML. Review the source of the image URLS being utilized. A cached image may have been copy/pasted from Gmail that is sourced from googleusercontent.com, which is generally very "spammy". To avoid this, upload a JPG/PNG to the Designer Tool and insert it in the email via an image content block in the Designer Tool. Alternately, the image could also be hosted on a business domain rather than copy/pasted from Gmail that is sourced from googleusercontent.com. |
Your message contains characteristics similar to those used by scammers | Remove the phrase "your compensation". |
A URI hostname has a long (6 characters or more) hexadecimal sequence. This looks suspicious | Review links for long number sequences such as abnormally formatted phone numbers. |
Your message claims to be a "marketing partner" of the recipient. This is often filtered as spam. | Remove the phrase "marketing partner" and/or "network partner". |
RAW: Message contains Dear but with no name | The email has been opened with "Dear" but an actual name has not be used. This may happen if "Dear" is followed with a merge field and the spam check is not seeing an actual first name because the merge field isn't populated until the email is sent. |
BODY: Incorporates a tracking ID number | Review for a very long link or word with hyphens. These will trigger this error. |
Subject talks about losing pounds | Review for the phrase "lose pounds/lbs/weight" in the subject line. |
UC_GIBBERISH_OBFU | This error can be triggered and can be a false positive due to long words in non-english languages. |
BODY: HTML: images with 2000-2400 bytes of words | The email is very short with only a small amount of text. |
BODY: One Time Rip Off | Review for the words "one time" or "rip off" and/or a combination of those words within the email content. |