Sentry Page Protection
Spam Scoring
Our comprehensive test checks your authentication, your reputation, and provides scores and feedback for common ISP and corporate filters, and is a feature of the Email Preview. This feature is an add-on option. Please check with your Digital Specialist if you would like to add this feature.
To view the spam scoring for a particular email, the email preview must have been checked on the test campaign.
To view the spam scoring for a particular email, the email preview must have been checked on the test campaign.
Emails that contain the Email View / Spam Report, will show an orange email icon in the details of the Sent Campaign Reports.
After clicking the orange icon, select the Spam Scores tab. The scoring from many spam filtering providers will show PASSED or FAILED. Some also provide the reasons the email may have failed.
So if you’re wondering how each spam filter actually scores the email, here’s a brief rundown of criteria from each provider:
POSTINI
Postini is another server-side spam filter, now owned by Google. Postini offers a ‘summary’ score between 0 and 100. Unlike the other filters, Postini scores are ‘higher the better’, with a score of 100 indicating an email is very unlikely to be spam. An email scoring below 1.0 is considered to be spam. Some organizations change this figure, many chose to use 8.0 as a threshold, offering a stricter filter. We have chosen a threshold of 1.0, but you should consider anything under 25 to be a concern. Postini also rates your email on a number of categories, including ‘commercial,’ ‘pornography’ and ‘racially offensive.’ The report shows if any of these category matches are triggered. A category score of below 85 is considered notable. If you score above 85, the report will hide the category match as scores above 85 indicate that the email is not considered to be of that category.
Postini is another server-side spam filter, now owned by Google. Postini offers a ‘summary’ score between 0 and 100. Unlike the other filters, Postini scores are ‘higher the better’, with a score of 100 indicating an email is very unlikely to be spam. An email scoring below 1.0 is considered to be spam. Some organizations change this figure, many chose to use 8.0 as a threshold, offering a stricter filter. We have chosen a threshold of 1.0, but you should consider anything under 25 to be a concern. Postini also rates your email on a number of categories, including ‘commercial,’ ‘pornography’ and ‘racially offensive.’ The report shows if any of these category matches are triggered. A category score of below 85 is considered notable. If you score above 85, the report will hide the category match as scores above 85 indicate that the email is not considered to be of that category.
BARRACUDA
The Barracuda Spam Firewall is an expensive hardware spam filter that is installed by large organizations within their own datacenters. Barracuda reports a single score, between 0 and 10 and a flag indicating if the email is considered to be spam. You should be aiming for a score below 3.5.
Please note, for some very spam-like emails, Barracuda will quarantine the email. In these cases Litmus will report the email as considered spam and mark it with a score of 10.0 (the maximum).
The Barracuda Spam Firewall is an expensive hardware spam filter that is installed by large organizations within their own datacenters. Barracuda reports a single score, between 0 and 10 and a flag indicating if the email is considered to be spam. You should be aiming for a score below 3.5.
Please note, for some very spam-like emails, Barracuda will quarantine the email. In these cases Litmus will report the email as considered spam and mark it with a score of 10.0 (the maximum).
MESSAGELABS
MessageLabs is an expensive corporate server-side spam filter. It is in use by many large organizations and is very regularly updated.
Somewhat confusingly, MessageLabs score in two different ways. On most emails, MessageLabs will actually report the score from a very well configured SpamAssassin installation, but there is no threshold in this case. So even with a score a 4, the email may be marked as spam.
Sometimes, MessageLabs will process the email using its own filter, which reports a very similar score to SpamAssassin, but rounded to the nearest whole number. In both cases, a score of 3 or more is to be avoided, but Litmus will always report if the email was considered spam by MessageLabs as a separate calculation to the score.
MessageLabs is an expensive corporate server-side spam filter. It is in use by many large organizations and is very regularly updated.
Somewhat confusingly, MessageLabs score in two different ways. On most emails, MessageLabs will actually report the score from a very well configured SpamAssassin installation, but there is no threshold in this case. So even with a score a 4, the email may be marked as spam.
Sometimes, MessageLabs will process the email using its own filter, which reports a very similar score to SpamAssassin, but rounded to the nearest whole number. In both cases, a score of 3 or more is to be avoided, but Litmus will always report if the email was considered spam by MessageLabs as a separate calculation to the score.
SPAMASSASSIN
SpamAssassin is a very popular open source spam filter. Here we are testing against version 3.3, using its default settings. SpamAssassin comes with a large set of rules which are applied to determine whether an email is spam or not. The scores can be positive or negative, with positive values indicating spam/failing emails and negative values indicating passing emails. The higher the positive score is, the higher the probability that the message is spam.
Generally, your email should have a score of 5.0 or lower to be considered passing. The lower your score, the more likely your email is going to be received in your subscribers’ inboxes.
SpamAssassin is a very popular open source spam filter. Here we are testing against version 3.3, using its default settings. SpamAssassin comes with a large set of rules which are applied to determine whether an email is spam or not. The scores can be positive or negative, with positive values indicating spam/failing emails and negative values indicating passing emails. The higher the positive score is, the higher the probability that the message is spam.
Generally, your email should have a score of 5.0 or lower to be considered passing. The lower your score, the more likely your email is going to be received in your subscribers’ inboxes.
OUTLOOK
Outlook utilizes a self-learning filter to determine what you think is spam. While this is great for individual users, it’s not consistent nor reliable for use across thousands of tests on our servers. Instead, we’ve added hundreds of spam rules that have been published by Outlook. Whenever the content in your campaign triggers one of these rules, we’ll provide you with feedback on what can be changed to make your email look less “spammy” to Outlook.
This filter on Litmus uses a built-in junk email filter for Outlook, which ships as part of Microsoft Office. This has various sensitivity settings, here we have set it to ‘High’. The Microsoft Outlook filter scores from 0-10 on the High sensitivity rating, with 0 being the highest (passing) and 10 being the lowest (failing). Outlook rates an email with a 6.0 or higher (out of 10) as a failure. A lower score (lower than 6.0) is considered a passing score with the High sensitivity rating.
Outlook utilizes a self-learning filter to determine what you think is spam. While this is great for individual users, it’s not consistent nor reliable for use across thousands of tests on our servers. Instead, we’ve added hundreds of spam rules that have been published by Outlook. Whenever the content in your campaign triggers one of these rules, we’ll provide you with feedback on what can be changed to make your email look less “spammy” to Outlook.
This filter on Litmus uses a built-in junk email filter for Outlook, which ships as part of Microsoft Office. This has various sensitivity settings, here we have set it to ‘High’. The Microsoft Outlook filter scores from 0-10 on the High sensitivity rating, with 0 being the highest (passing) and 10 being the lowest (failing). Outlook rates an email with a 6.0 or higher (out of 10) as a failure. A lower score (lower than 6.0) is considered a passing score with the High sensitivity rating.
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WEBMAIL/ISP CLIENTS
Emails that have successfully been received in the email will show as a “passed” score. Anything that has a “failed” score will indicate that the email was not received in the inbox, which means the email could have been blocked or sent to the junk folder for that particular email client. You will also want to make sure that you are sending in your email to the complete list of seed list addresses in order to see the accurate reputation scoring for your email.
Part of the issue of testing for spam on webmail providers (such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook.com, and AOL Mail) is that a large portion of their spam scoring is based on internal metrics and algorithms — for example, it’s common for a single email send to a single Inbox on Yahoo! to be delivered successfully, but that same email may become suspicious when sent to ten or hundreds of thousands of recipients. Sometimes, a portion of recipients complain or do not engage with the email, leading the rest of the send to be delayed or marked as spam. Trends in engagement from a particular sender or IP may also produce blocks or delays, as do spam filters that “learn” about what individual users consider spam through open, click and reporting behaviors. These scenarios are difficult, if not impossible, to predict.
The webmail filters do not provide us any further information as to why an email has not been received in the inbox. You may want to check the warnings produced by server side filters (like Barracuda or SpamAssassin) and update your email with the changes those filters have suggested. You may also want to check with your Email Service Provider to see if users for a particular webmail service have marked your previous campaigns as spam in the past, as this can affect your spam performance for your email campaigns sent now.
Emails that have successfully been received in the email will show as a “passed” score. Anything that has a “failed” score will indicate that the email was not received in the inbox, which means the email could have been blocked or sent to the junk folder for that particular email client. You will also want to make sure that you are sending in your email to the complete list of seed list addresses in order to see the accurate reputation scoring for your email.
Part of the issue of testing for spam on webmail providers (such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook.com, and AOL Mail) is that a large portion of their spam scoring is based on internal metrics and algorithms — for example, it’s common for a single email send to a single Inbox on Yahoo! to be delivered successfully, but that same email may become suspicious when sent to ten or hundreds of thousands of recipients. Sometimes, a portion of recipients complain or do not engage with the email, leading the rest of the send to be delayed or marked as spam. Trends in engagement from a particular sender or IP may also produce blocks or delays, as do spam filters that “learn” about what individual users consider spam through open, click and reporting behaviors. These scenarios are difficult, if not impossible, to predict.
The webmail filters do not provide us any further information as to why an email has not been received in the inbox. You may want to check the warnings produced by server side filters (like Barracuda or SpamAssassin) and update your email with the changes those filters have suggested. You may also want to check with your Email Service Provider to see if users for a particular webmail service have marked your previous campaigns as spam in the past, as this can affect your spam performance for your email campaigns sent now.