Your spam score

Do you know your spam score? Can you quantify the number of e-mails you send compared to the number of e-mails from your subscribers entering their inbox?

This score is calculated on a scale of 1 to 10. Between 0 and 5 an e-mail is considered good, but an optimal spam score is between 0 and 2.5. Any score between 5 and 8 is passable, and above 8 will simply never reach the recipient.

There are several free tools that can help. Some are kept directly on the web, and others are programs which need to be downloaded and installed locally. Web-based tools are not necessarily bad, but in certain cases it’s not advisable to give your information to a website.

One economical solution that’s easy to use for small mailings is called “mailingcheck” (http://www.mainlingcheck.com). This program is completely free and allows the user to verify his own spam score. Please note that the program is only offered in English, and requires the user to have some knowledge of how to save e-mails in “.eml” format. It allows you to verify locally or online to change the score priority.

Finally, regardless of the tools used, please keep in mind that spam is, first and foremost an unwanted e-mail that has not been authorized to be sent. Always ask subscribers if they authorize you to send messages to them. To do this, you can use solutions such as AWeber (http://www.aweber.com). These solutions also give you a tool to calculate your spam score. Reports on your mailings are also available, as well as statistics such as the number of users who have opened your message, clickable links in your messages, and more.

Watch this useful video from Aweber!

Good luck!