Perform a pre-send spam test

Litmus provides a spam check for every email project that covers 8 essential spam checks in the Spam Testing section of your Previews & QA checklist. For a deeper spam test report, you can perform a pre-send spam test and get results quickly to help your emails find subscriber inboxes!

Start your spam test

Select the Test your email button dropdown on either the Home or Emails page and find the option to Start a spam test.

Once you select Start a spam test, you'll see two different options, Pull from your ESP and Manual Send.

Pull from your ESP testing

Starting a spam test with an ESP connection requires an existing ESP integration. Once that integration is in place, spam testing starts with the same Start a new spam test button.

Select Pull from your ESP, choose your ESP and an email, and then the Start your test button. The test results Summary window will appear as your results begin to process.

When you start your spam test with this method, it starts a process similar to the Manual Send method in one step.

Manual send testing

The manual send option provides you a unique list of seed addresses for each test. Use all the seed addresses that appear in the list and send your email from your ESP. 

If your ESP allows importing addresses, you can download a csv copy of the list. Otherwise, you can copy the list to your clipboard and paste the addresses in to send.

If you can't send to all the addresses because your ESP limits the number of test send recipients, you can send the test in batches within one hour of creating the seed list. The first seed list address is critical for test success.

Once you've sent the email to your seed list, select the green Yes, I've sent it button to begin receiving your results. 

Spam test results

Spam test results are grouped by Authentication Filters, Blocklist Filters and Placement Filters. You can choose Review your results with the link at the right of each section in the Summary.

Select Results in the left menu pane to see the detailed list for each test. Every result will include links to learn more about the particular check, as well as a Help link for details and links to information on correcting issues.

Spam results in Previews & QA checklist

If you build in Litmus, you'll find a spam check email address to send in your email for essential checks results.

When you create an email by sending in a draft email, you’ll automatically see the essential spam checks in the Spam Testing section of your Previews & QA.

This check looks at your authentication records' set up, including DMARC, DKIM and more, and makes sure you’re not on any blocklists. We now also verify you have BIMI set up and configured correctly.

Correcting authentication records and blocklist errors often provides the greatest impact on your deliverability.

Spam test troubleshooting

Email contains variable parameters in subject line or content-type is text/plain

Variable parameters to personalize a subject line can prevent Litmus from matching your email to test results.

If your email is plain text, we cannot process text/plain messages in spam testing.

"Whoops! We can't find your test email."

The most common reason for this message is because your email was not received at the key email address in the seed list provided.

To match your email from the spam test providers back to your Litmus account, we match the email you sent to the critical first email address (which looks like xxxxxx@s.litmustest.com) with the emails that arrive in the third-party appliances.

Individual test result unavailable

• Manual send: The most likely cause of an individual test being unavailable is because your email was not received at the corresponding seed address. This could be because it was missed from the seed list, the email was sent to an old, previously used list, or that the email was not successfully delivered by your ESP.
• Either method: If you or your team are sending in the same email multiple times for testing in a short period, mismatching can occur. Please wait at least one hour between starting a spam test for a single email in order to limit the possibility of mismatched or missing results. 
• Either method: If a test continues to be unavailable after a new spam test, and your ESP shows that the email was successfully delivered and not bounced to all email addresses, please contact Litmus Support. If your ESP is showing your email was delivered to all addresses, please provide the Support Team with the logs or a screenshot of the information and they can investigate this further with you.

Results show email marked as spam

Spam testing is tricky because they won't tell you exactly why your email failed—mainly because that would allow spammers to get around their algorithms!

It's also important to note that each recipient of your email has their own rules/filters set up and how each inbox treats the same email is unique to the recipient.

You or your IT team can often find further information by looking at the full email headers. They contain a lot of interesting information about how your email has been handled, where it's been routed, and other key metadata. You can view the headers by clicking the Troubleshooting? View the full email headers link within each placement test.