There are numerous spam filters available, both free and for purchase.
If you have an email marketing solution that allows you to use a third-party spam filter to scan messages, then you can use this option to check your messages. One common solution for email spam filtering is SpamAssasin.
But spam checking is by far not enough for deliverability today. You will need to follow best permission based email marketing practices closely, build your trust and reputation, and use email authentication. These are the basic
foundation blocks for long term success.

Some Tech Tips for background information 
(related to L-Soft’s products but the general advice applies to all solutions)

*Spam checker and related deliverability methods
http://www.lsoft.se/news/techtipMAE-issue2-2005-us.asp

*Deliverability infrastructure and email authentication:
http://www.lsoft.se/news/techtiplsv-issue4-2006-us.asp

Probably one of the most well known open source (free) anti spam applications is Spam Assassin

http://spamassassin.apache.org/

This program is widely used to power many spam firewalls, so if you want to use a single source for your content checking, this would be a popular choice. The main issue with these types of content filters, is that they tend to all weight different words and phrases with a different “SPAM” score. The other issue with this type of filtering is that it is highly configurable, meaning that one person’s installation might be different from another’s.

To counter this, the new buzz word in the spam filtering arena is “Reputation”. Reputation is an amalgamation of a number of metrics that include;

•    Volume of complaints

•    Volume of Hard bounces

•    Volume of email send

•    History of IP

•    Real Time Black List inclusion

•    Mailing consistency
 
Leaders in this type of monitoring, Return Path  http://www.returnpath.net/   have recently released a study that in 77% of the time, reputation has the greatest impact in delivery to the inbox, and content only 17%, and if you consider that they are delivery partners for Microsoft, and run the only white list that Microsoft domains use, they are defiantly worth listening to.
This has been borne out by our experience with sending out 45 + million emails per month, and has demonstrated that reputation really does make the most difference when you are trying to optimise delivery.

Delivery into the inbox is one of the greatest challenges that faces online marketing, and based on the latest DMA metrics of 68% delivery for acquisition and 80% for retention emails, many are not winning the battle.

My advice would be to work with one of the specialist ESP’s or delivery consultants, even if you use your own in-house delivery mechanisms, this could pay dividends even in the short term.

But if this is not what you want for now, the Return Path website is full of advice.         

Hi Natalie,

We have a solution called EmailAdvisor.

As well as checking if your email will get through, it also tells you how it will be formated on landing.

Please read more about it here and then call us to discuss how we can be of service.

Jon Davey

01753 852904