Check the copy
Plain text or HTML. Nothing leaves your browser.
How it works
Scan
Subject and body are matched against five phrase lists — urgency, money, hype, shady, and the salesy filler that marks a template — on whole-word boundaries.
Shape
Capitals, exclamation marks, repeated punctuation, emoji, link count, shorteners, images, word count and subject length are each measured.
Weigh
Each finding adds points. Shady and hype phrases and shorteners weigh most; a long body or a missing personalisation token weighs little.
Read
The score is a risk band, not a placement prediction. The highlighted copy shows exactly what to cut.
What word lists can and cannot tell you
No modern filter blocks a message because it contains the word "free". Gmail's classifier is trained on what its users report, and what they report is mail that looks like it was sent to a million people. Trigger words matter because they are the vocabulary of that mail — "act now", "limited time", "guaranteed" — and a message full of them reads as a broadcast whatever the sending infrastructure looks like. This checker scores the vocabulary and the shape of the message together, which is a reasonable proxy for "does this look like a person wrote it to me".
The salesy list is the one to take seriously
The shady and hype lists are obvious; nobody sending real cold email uses "dear friend" or "you have been selected". The list that catches good senders is the filler — "I wanted to reach out", "hope this finds you well", "quick question", "hop on a call". None of those is a spam word. All of them are what every template says, and a filter that has seen ten thousand identical openers learns the pattern. A message that gets to the point in the first sentence scores better here and, in my experience, replies better too.
Shape matters as much as words
Links are the biggest structural signal. A first-touch cold email needs at most one, and a shortened one is worse than none: the filter cannot see where it goes, which is exactly why spammers use them. Images turn a text message into an HTML campaign. Word count above 150 or so drifts from "note" into "pitch". Personalisation tokens are counted because their absence usually means the copy is identical across the list, and identical copy from twenty inboxes is the pattern that gets a domain flagged.
Where copy stops being the problem
If a message scores under fifteen here and still lands in spam, the copy is not the cause. Check that the domain authenticates and aligns, that the inboxes were warmed, that the per-inbox volume is sane, and that the list is clean. The deliverability score and the email verifier are the next two stops. Copy is the part everyone rewrites first because it is the part they can see.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a list of words that get emails blocked?
Not in the way people imagine. Filters are statistical, not keyword-based. Certain vocabulary correlates strongly with bulk and scam mail, and a message built from it looks like that mail. This tool scores that correlation.
What score is safe?
Under 15 is what a plain, personal message scores. 15–35 means something is worth cutting. Over 35 means the copy reads as a campaign regardless of what else you fix.
Does the tool check HTML?
Yes. Paste raw HTML and it strips tags for the word scan, then counts images, links and href targets separately.
Why is 'unsubscribe' flagged?
In a one-to-one cold email it tells the filter the message is bulk. Bulk sender rules require an unsubscribe mechanism for marketing mail, but a personal note reads better with a plain sentence.
Does this send my email anywhere?
No. The scan runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is logged or transmitted.
Last reviewed
What to run next
The checks that most often follow this one.
More in this category
Guides that go deeper
When the tools tell you something is wrong
The diagnostics here are free and always will be. When the fix is bigger than a DNS record, this is the work I do.
Deliverability rescue
Mail landing in spam, replies gone quiet, or a domain suddenly blocked. I find the actual cause rather than guessing, and fix it.
- Authentication and alignment failures
- Blocklist delistings and reputation repair
- Gateway and filter-level blocks
- A written report on what broke and why
Email & sending infrastructure
Sending domains, inboxes, authentication and warmup, built to survive volume instead of burning down in a month.
- Domain and inbox fleets at any scale
- SPF, DKIM, DMARC and tracking domains
- Google Workspace — Silver Partner
- Handover documentation you actually own
Domain, DNS & migration
Changing registrar, mail provider or host without a day of downtime or a week of mail silently failing.
- Registrar and nameserver moves
- Workspace and Microsoft 365 migrations
- MX, SSL and subdomain cutover
- Staged rollout with rollback at every step
Monitoring & retainer
Infrastructure drifts. Records get edited, certificates expire, domains get listed. Ongoing eyes on the fleet.
- Scheduled checks across every domain
- Alerts before your clients notice
- Monthly reporting
- Priority response when something breaks
Start with a call
Bring a domain and the symptom. I will tell you what is actually wrong and whether you need me at all — plenty of people leave that call able to fix it themselves.
Thirty minutes, no pitch
We will run the checks together on your actual domains, and you will leave knowing what is broken, what it takes to fix, and what it should cost. If that is a job you can do in-house, I will say so.