We first launched our Inbox Inspector tool in May 2007. It was pretty revolutionary at the time (ahem, imho) to be offering a “one-click” testing service like this to the masses. Unfortunately, it also seemed fairly expensive to most people. $39 for three tests seemed high (still, much cheaper than an embarrassing email design mistake). Over the years, we kept reducing its price, eventually whittling it down to under $5 per test.

But we’re pretty excited to announce that we’re now making Inbox Inspections totally free…

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Our inbox inspector will tell you if your email will get blocked by spam filters.

But diagnosing the exact reason your email was blocked can be extremely difficult.

The only way to really figure out why your message was blocked is to systematically test each variable: change your subject line, and send another test email. Go check all your test accounts. Did it get blocked again? Well, change this link. Still blocked? Change another link. Wasn’t your links? Swap out the images. Not it? Change your content. Over and over, till you find the culprit. Then, do all that again for the next spam filter. Complete p.i.t.a.

So we automated all that with our new Delivery Doctor tool. Push one button, and we’ll automagically slice and dice and analyze your email and run dozens of tests until we find the root of your block.

Then, we tell you what to fix…

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We just added 3 new spam filters to our Inbox Inspector tool: Outlook 2007, Norton Internet Security 2008 and McAfee Security Center 2008.

MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector is an add-on that lets you check your email campaign’s “score” with all the major spam filters. With one click, you can tell what the likelihood is of your email getting blocked by inbox spam filters, server filters (like Postini, BrightMail, MessageLabs, and Spam Assassin), and Gateway filters like IronPort. Here’s a screenshot of what the spam filter check report looks like:

If you’re like to learn more about the Inbox Inspector, click here or check out this demo video.

To learn more about how spam filters work (and how to avoid getting trapped), check out the Deliverability section of the MailChimp email marketing resource center:

• How Spam Filters Think
• How Email Firewalls Work
• Avoid AppleMail’s Spam Filter

We’re always preaching that you should never send an image-only or very image-heavy HTML email. It’s #3 on our top email marketing mistakes we see people make.

But there are always going to be exceptions. You will inevitably come up with an email campaign that’s very image heavy. Perhaps it’s for a big splashy product promotion. Or a big e-coupon. Or some postcard. Whatever.

Mark Brownlow recently posted an interesting theory on how you can increase your chances of that email getting opened, and we wondered if it was possible for our customers to (easily) do this sort of thing in MailChimp…

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A little while back we mentioned some spam filters were automatically clicking every single link inside of email campaigns, to check out the reputation of the landing page.

The problem was that these spam filters were also automatically clicking our one-click unsubscribe link. While it’s not a widespread problem (yet), we have started to receive calls about unwanted unsubscribes. We traced most back to Trend Micro.

Anyway, most people recommended a 2-step unsubscribe process in response to this. And that’s a logical recommendation.

But whenever I actually work up the energy to click an unsubscribe link, I want off. NOW. Taking me to a landing page where I have to click yet another button—or even worse—enter my email address again, is not acceptable. It just looks pathetic. Like it’s a lame attempt to keep me trapped on the list. Especially when the confirmation buttons are confusing:

“Yes, I don’t want to unsubscribe” and “No, I want to stay on the list.”

Our programmer (The Chad) came up with a novel workaround, allowing us to keep the one-click convenience, while using the 2-step as a fallback…

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