Content and Spam Check

Content and Spam Check allows you to test your campaign in several different email clients, to see how your email will appear to different recipients.

On this page:

Requesting Content and Spam Check

On the Campaign Overview page, in the Test Options dropdown, select Content and spam check.

When you request a content test, you have the option to run the test as a specific record, whilst also having the option to add a description.

Testing a Split Test campaign

The Content Previews page appears, which displays the previous content previews for that campaign. The table will be black if there are no prior content previews of the campaign.

Click CREATE NEW CONTENT PREVIEW to start a new content and spam check. The Request content and spam check dialog box appears.

Testing a Split Test campaign

If you are testing a split test campaign, when you request the content preview you will be given the option to select a variant.

The test will then run exactly as it would for a regular campaign using the selected variant's content.

Viewing Previews

Once a content and spam check is requested, the preview takes a couple of minutes to load completely. You can leave the preview page if you need to whilst it is loading, and return when it has finished, from the Content Previews page.

The previews are segregated as Desktop Clients, Webmail Clients, Mobile clients and Spam Filters. The different clients are organised into tabs which are displayed at the top of the section. Each tab shows the available previews displayed as thumbnails, and clicking on each thumbnail will bring up a screenshot of how your email would look when opened in that client.

Webmail Clients

In a complete test, the Webmail client previews also include how the email renders in Edge, Chrome and Firefox.

Some email clients will disable images by default, and within the relevant preview you can click 'Images On' at the top of the screen to see how the email will look with and without images.

The Webmail client test also includes a colour blindness simulation. Widely known as Deuteranomaly (red/green colour blindness), affects 6% of males and 0.4% of females, and the preview screenshot allows you to see how your campaign would display to those affected. This may help address accessibility problems that may not be obvious to someone without that condition.

Colour Blindness Simulations

Mobile Clients

Clicking on the thumbnail of a mobile client will open a screenshot within an imitation of the mobile user interface. You will not be able to interact with the interface, but you can view the entire email by scrolling up and down using the arrows, or using the scroll bar in the iPhone and iPad interfaces.

Viewing Old Previews

The Content Previews page displays the old content for campaign previews under the Archive and Current tabs. The Current tab displays the content preview list for Litmus results. The Archive tab displays a content preview list for both Litmus results as well as the Return Path results.

The previews are listed according to their dates, with the recent one first. You can click the name to see each preview, which is why it can be useful to add unique descriptions when originally requesting the content preview.

Spam Filters

The 'Spam Filters' page displays results from a combination of commercial spam filters, desktop mail clients, and authentication methods. These give an indication of your campaign's deliverability.

Spam scores

The spam scores listed on the right hand side are not comparable; they are an internal score relative to each individual filter. The scores can be useful to note when adjusting your email content and repeating the preview, as the result may go up or down depending on the changes you make.

Where information is available, the filters will provide additional details, which you can view by clicking the 'Details' link for each individual filter.

Commercial spam filters

  • Postini: Google's commercial spam filter used by both businesses and consumers
  • MessageLabs: A commercial spam filter used by many large businesses
  • SpamAssassin: A very popular open source spam filter. Its rules are rather conservative so rarely filters legitimate commercial email
  • Barracuda: A commercial spam filter similar to SpamAssassin, but with rules specifically designed to identify commercial email

Desktop clients

  • Outlook:A spam filter built into recent versions of Microsoft Outlook

Outlook filters on the content of the email only, and provides both a spam score and details of any issues flagged.

Webmail clients

  • Gmail
  • Mobile Me
  • GMX
  • FastMail
  • Lycos
  • Mail.com

These filters do not provide additional details, but give an indication whether the email was delivered or junked when tested.

Content validation

  • HTML validation
  • Link and image validation

These checks make sure that the different parts of the email content are valid. Invalid HTML is rarely a significant problem with email (very few email clients produce completely valid HTML), but it's considered best practice to eliminate invalid HTML where possible.

Authentication

  • Sender ID
  • Sender Policy Framework

These are a means of authentication, to verify that the mail server sending the email is allowed to send mail for the email address. In most cases, Adestra takes care of ensuring these authentication mechanisms are working correctly, but there are some situation in which you may run into problems (particularly if you're using a delegated domain that isn't set up properly), so this is useful to check.