Content analysis

Find out which word sent you to spam.

Knowing an email landed in spam does not tell you what to change. Content analysis reads the message that actually arrived, marks the exact lines working against you, and tells you which ones to fix first. Most of the time it is not your servers. It is a subject line.

content-analysis · report
72/100Composite content score
  • Delivery path88
  • Authentication96
  • Deterministic rules61
  • Rspamd74
  • AI review66

Verdict. Authentication and delivery path are clean. The score is held back by wording and link balance, which is a content fix rather than a reputation one. Example report.

What you actually get

Your email, with the problems marked on it.

This is the report, not a description of it. Click any marker to see what the engine found, why it matters to a filter, and the specific change to make.

The email we analyzedExample
Fromdeals@shop-example.com
SubjectFREE GIFT!!! Your ORDER is waiting

Hi there, act now, this offer expires today and you will not see it again.

To claim it, visit your accountgoes to bit.ly/2xKp9

Unsubscribe

High impactWording rules and the AI review

The subject line is doing the most damage

All caps, an exclamation mark and "FREE" in the first three words. This is the single strongest spam signal in the message, and filters weight the subject heavily because it is the cheapest thing for a bad sender to abuse.

What to do

Say what the email is. "Your March invoice is ready" gets opened by the people who actually wanted it.

BeforeFREE GIFT!!! Your ORDER is waitingContent score 41/100
AfterYour March invoice is readyContent score 88/100

Example scores. The point is that none of these fixes touched your servers, your DNS or your reputation. They were all in the message.

Where the score comes from

Five passes over one email, in plain English.

Each one answers a different question, and you see all five results rather than a single number you have to trust.

01

Did it really come from you?

We re-run the cryptographic checks on the message that arrived rather than trusting the headers it carried. If your signature broke somewhere in transit, that is a silent deliverability leak and you would never see it from your own sent folder.

Catches: broken DKIM signatures, SPF that fails from your real sending IP, DMARC that does not line up

02

What route did it take to get there?

We walk the delivery path backwards to find the machine that actually sent it and whether every hop was encrypted. Sometimes the answer explains everything: mail leaving from an IP you did not know you were using.

Catches: unexpected sending IPs, unencrypted hops, relays you did not intend

03

Does the writing look like spam?

Around 105 rules over the subject, the wording, the HTML, the links and the images. This is the pass that produces most of what you can fix today, which is why it counts for the most.

Catches: shouty subjects, fake urgency, mismatched links, image-only emails, missing unsubscribe

04

What would a real spam filter score it?

We run the message through Rspamd, an open-source filter used in production by real mail servers, and show you every rule it triggered with the points attached. It is the closest thing to a second opinion from the other side.

Catches: the exact symbols a receiving filter would fire, and how close you are to its threshold

05

How does it read to a person?

An AI pass reads the email the way a recipient would and says what a rules engine cannot: whether the tone is off, which Gmail tab it expects to land in, and what to write instead.

Catches: tone problems, readability, compliance risks, and specific replacement wording

The wording rules carry the most weight in the score, because they are the findings you can act on this afternoon without touching your infrastructure.

Links and unsubscribe

The parts of a message most likely to get it filtered.

Links are where well-meaning email most often trips a filter. These checks run on every analysis.

Checked on every report

  • Visible link text against its true destination
  • Root domain of every link
  • Suspicious terms inside URLs
  • How many links, and the balance between them
  • Unsubscribe present and compliant
  • RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe support

Built, not yet enabled

Deeper link inspection exists but is currently switched off: following redirect chains, spotting dead links, unresolvable domains and blocklisted hops. It is held back because fetching arbitrary URLs from a report needs careful protection against server-side request forgery.

We would rather tell you a check is off than imply it ran.

How it fits

It runs with your placement test.

There is no separate step. Run a placement test, and once a seed inbox receives the message the analysis starts on its own.

  1. 1

    Run a placement test

    Send from your real sending path to the seed network.

  2. 2

    A seed receives the message

    The delivered copy is captured, exactly as a receiver got it.

  3. 3

    The five checks run

    Delivery path, authentication, rules, Rspamd and the AI review.

  4. 4

    You get a score and fixes

    One composite out of 100, the full breakdown, a verdict and prioritized recommendations.

If nothing reaches a seed inbox, the report says so rather than guessing. That is a delivery problem, and blacklist monitoring plus Inbox Boost are where you fix it.

Questions

Content analysis, answered.

What does content analysis need to run?
One delivered copy of the message from a seed inbox. It runs automatically as part of a placement test, so there is nothing extra to set up. If no seed mailbox received the email at all, the report says so and stops, because there is no message to analyze. That case is itself a useful finding: a message that never arrived is a delivery problem, not a content problem.
How is the score calculated?
Each of the five passes scores separately, and they combine into one number out of 100. They are not weighted equally: the wording rules count for the most, because those are the findings you can act on straight away, and the AI review is next. You always see all five results next to the total, so you can tell exactly which one pulled you down instead of guessing.
What does it check about my links?
Visible link text against its real destination, root domains, suspicious terms in URLs, how many links there are and the balance between them, and whether your unsubscribe meets expectations, including RFC 8058 one-click support. Deeper link checking that follows redirect chains and detects dead links is built but not currently enabled.
Does it tell me what to change?
Yes. Alongside the score and a plain verdict you get prioritized recommendations, and where the AI review finds a wording problem it suggests specific alternative phrasing rather than just flagging it.
What happens to my message?
The captured copy is kept for 24 hours so the analysis can run and be re-read, then it goes. The report itself is retained so you can compare it against later tests.
How is this different from the placement test?
The placement test tells you where a message landed, per provider: Inbox, Promotions, Updates, Social or Spam. Content analysis explains why it landed there. You need both, because the fix for a reputation problem and the fix for a subject-line problem are completely different.
Start free in two minutes

Find out why, not just where.

Run a placement test and the content analysis comes with it. Free to start, no card required.