Cold email spam checker

What the spam score actually measures

The checker starts every email at 100 and subtracts a weighted penalty for each copy-level signal it finds. Trigger words cost the most (six points per matched phrase, capped at twenty-five), followed by link stuffing, then shouting, then punctuation, length and missing personalisation. Nothing is added back, so the score is simply what survives the deductions.

It reads your subject line and body only. It is not a live spam-filter test: it does not connect to Gmail or Outlook, does not query DNS, and does not open an SMTP session. That matters because copy is the half of deliverability you control from a text box — the other half lives in your domain records and your sending history.

Everything runs in your browser. The draft you paste is never uploaded, which is why the tool is safe to use on an unreleased campaign or a message that names a real prospect.

Reading your result

Treat the number as a triage signal, not a verdict. Two emails can score the same and land differently because their senders differ. What the score does tell you reliably is whether the copy itself is adding avoidable risk.

80 and above

Clean. The copy is not what is holding this campaign back — if you are still landing in spam, the cause is upstream: authentication, warmup, per-mailbox volume or list quality.

55 to 79

Borderline. Usually one or two heavy penalties, most often a cluster of salesy phrases or more than two links. Fix those and the score typically clears 80 without a rewrite.

Below 55

The message reads promotional. Several penalties are stacking — normally trigger words plus ALL-CAPS plus exclamation marks. Rewrite the first three lines in plain language before sending to anyone.

The mistakes that cost the most points

Trigger phrases are the biggest single drain: words like guaranteed, act now, limited time, risk-free and click here each add to the same penalty, so a paragraph of sales language can wipe out a quarter of the score on its own. Rewriting them into how you would say it out loud usually fixes the whole block.

Links are the next most expensive. More than two URLs in a first-touch email reads as a broadcast, not a one-to-one note; one link, or none, is the safer shape. ALL-CAPS words and repeated exclamation or question marks are cheap to remove and always worth removing.

Length is scored in both directions. Bodies over two hundred words are penalised because a long cold email buries the ask, and bodies under twenty words are penalised because there is no room for a specific reason to have written. The checker also looks for a personalisation cue — a merge field, a bracketed placeholder or a greeting with a name — and deducts when it finds none, because a message with nothing recipient-specific in it is the pattern filters are built to catch.

What a clean score still cannot promise

Inbox placement is decided mostly by the sender, not the sentence. A perfect score will not save mail sent from a domain with no SPF, DKIM or DMARC, from a mailbox that has never been warmed, or to a list with a high bounce rate. If your copy is clean and placement is still poor, the deliverability checker is the next step for a setup audit, and the SPF, DKIM and DMARC generator will produce the DNS records you are missing.