How To Test Email Deliverability - % In Junk Folder

Question

Does anyone know a good tool to test whether your emails are going into spam folders?

My web app generates emails to users, and I've been getting a lot of reports back from people saying "hey, no one ever responded to my message".

I have SPF rules in place and functioning correctly (email header shows an spf pass). I've also run my message through spam assassin and it scores very low.

Any other ideas?

Answer 1

To know if your email goes in the inbox, you need to get a metric called "Inbox Placement Rate". This indicator can be provided by Return Path, but it's quite expensive. If you're not sending huge volumes it might not worth it. The only way to measure the IPR is actually to have a certain number of test inboxes... In other words: the only way to chech that your email is not in the spam folder is to make the test and see what happen. There is not other magic solution and that's what Return Path is doing.

This means that when you hear about people claiming they have a 99% deliverability / delivery, it might be true be it just means that the email was "accepted" or "delivered" by the ISP. It's a lot, but it's not everything!

What you should do is the following: use an ESP focusing on deliverability. Personally I work for Mailjet. I believe it's the best value you can get: personalized DKIM and SPF are provided for free, you get the antispam scorings, the analytics, Ip reputation monitoring, throttling, etc. It's an all in one tool to avoid the headaches of optimizing yourself. It's more expensive that Amazon SES because you get a lot of added value services, but it has much lower prices than a lot of traditional ESPs!

Bottom line is: optimizing everything yourself is a full time job. Knowing exactly if an email is in the inbox or not will cost you a lot. The best way to proceed is to:

• respect the best practices (opt in, not too much images, no red, etc.)
• get some metrics such as open rates, click rates, delivery, etc. and watch their evolution over time. Any change from one sending to the other might be a signal for a problem you want to investigate.
• Use a tool that takes care all the deliverability optimizations

Mailjet is cool because no matter which plan you pick, you get to use all the options. But if you want a full overview of what is existing, check out this comparison table:

http://socialcompare.com/en/comparison/transactional-emailing-providers-mailjet-sendgrid-critsend

If you're a perfectionist who wants to finetune the layout, how the emails are displayed etc. Check out Litmus, it's also a quite powerful tool!

http://litmus.com/