Testing Emails with Mail Tester

ClickDimensions has a variety of ways to test your emails including the Inbox Preview and Email Send Test, but cautious marketers may want to run their email through another test before sending. Mail Tester runs a Spam Assassin test (like we do) as well as checking your SPF record and sender reputation all in one go. 

To start, just send your email to the email address given in the tree house, then click “then check your score”. In this example, I set up an Email Send, added the email address here in the Test Email Address field, saved, and clicked “Test”. Doing this gives me our built in test, a copy of the message to my inbox, and Mail Tester’s evaluation all at once.

Once I sent the message, I clicked “then check your score” on the Mail Tester home page I had opened.

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We got a great score! To dig deeper into the particulars of the email, just expand each box. Here’s what we got in each category.

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This is fairly basic, but I could expand this to check the HTML version as received as well as the text version of the email.

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Next is the Spam Assassin test. Here’s where you can check your SPF record. We always recommend setting up an SPF record so that your customers’ inboxes know you’re allowing ClickDimensions to send emails on your behalf. You can set up your SPF record following these instructions.

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The only comment here is we do not have a DMARC record set up for this email. This is something we could consider doing in the future, but according to the test, everything else is set up correctly and it shouldn’t effect deliverability.

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HTML code authenticator: this is where we lost our half a point. We didn’t add an alt attribute to every image in our email. (Valid HTML requires an alt attribute set for each image for accessibility and other reasons.) This is very easy to go back and fix, so we’ll tweak this before we send out our final mailing.

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Next, we’re checked against various blacklists and we are not listed in any of them.

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Finally, all links are checked to make sure they are valid and formatted properly. We didn’t have any broken links, and with that the check is complete. Our total score was 9.5/10, so we could feel confident about sending this email out now (after a check with our inbox to make sure the design is correct). Even still, we’ll add that missing alt attribute to give our message as much validation as possible when it goes out.

Written by Courtney Smith, ClickDimensions Marketing Success Manager. 

 

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