If you’re regularly sending email using your own email system, you may be familiar with a few of the best tools out there.

Here are some of my favorites:

• www.mail-tester.com
• www.isnotspam.com
• sendcheckit.com
• spamcheck.postmarkapp.com

I could get into the pros and cons of each of these (oh, and if you’re on my list, you’ll soon find out about a tool that does far more than any of these do) but bar-none, the best is mail-tester.com

The only quirky part is the Spam Assassin test. Every single test in that system is black and white. What they say to do, you can do and fix your score. Just not a Spam Assassin or bad Razor2 confidence score.

Ever see something like this?

RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_E8_51_100

RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_51_100

RAZOR2_CHECK

Email is NOT an exact science. Just because you get a 10/10 score on Mail-tester does NOT mean you’ll reach all the major ESP’s inboxes. Likewise, just because you’re score is lower or you’re getting a Razor2 error does NOT mean you’re going to have trouble inboxing.

There are far more factors involved.

Yes, you should TRY hard to adjust your content, take out ‘spammy’ words, try not to re-use the same test a million times, and attempt to get a good Spam Assassin score. Sometimes, that’s just not an option. In those cases, I’d recommend sending your email to AOL, Gmail, Comcast, Yahoo and other ‘seed’ accounts and seeing how you inbox there. If you do well, just mail and ignore Razor2.

If you don’t… Let’s say you use SMTP.com, SendGrid, Green Arrow, MailJet or similar and you’re just not able to get that score to go away.

The first thing you might want to check is your reputation score at SenderScore.org.

Sign up for a free account to get the comprehensive report. You really should be going in there every couple days anyway if you send heavy volume. Check the IP address of your email and see what kind of scores your getting.

Secondly, log into your account with your SMTP provider and remove click tracking and open tracking. Sometimes their signatures or domains are detected as spam senders and can give you a poor score. You may also want to check formatting, spelling, HTML validation and even if your software is putting an X-Priority header into your emails. All of those things can cause a Razor2 score as well.

SenderScore is a great resource but isn’t necessarily the exact ‘score’ that say Comcast or Yahoo would give you if they had such a score. Your reputation will have to build up slowly over time.

As long as you’re not sending to tons of unknown users, hard bounces or getting tons of spam complaints, don’t be afraid to let your rep score grow over time!

If you’re still stuck after trying all of that, consider a 1 hour consultation with one of our experts.