Free spam word checker.
Paste an email and see every phrase filters dislike, highlighted, with the structural flags counted alongside. Worth being honest up front: wording is close to the last thing modern filters weigh, and the first thing people rewrite when mail goes to spam.
Privacy: this tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type leaves this page, nothing is stored, and nothing is sent to GrowthPal.
Spam filtering at a glance
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| What dominates filtering | Sender reputation and recipient engagement, by a wide margin |
| What wording contributes | A small amount, at the margin. Cold email lives at the margin |
| The bigger content signal | Links, images and tracked elements, not vocabulary |
| The useful side effect | Phrasing that trips filters usually reads as salesy to people too |
| What to check first when mail goes to spam | Authentication, warmup pace, bounce rate. Then wording |
Do spam words still matter?
Spam trigger words are phrases historically associated with bulk marketing that contribute a small negative weight to a filter's assessment of a message. They matter less than they did in 2010 and more than nothing.
Filtering moved on. A modern provider decides mostly on who is sending, whether their previous mail was engaged with, whether the domain is authenticated, and how the volume pattern looks. Those signals dwarf vocabulary. A trusted sender can write "free" and "act now" and still land in the inbox, which is why every list of forbidden words eventually reads as superstition.
The reason to care anyway is that cold email is the case where the dominant signals are all weak. A new sending domain has no reputation and almost no engagement history, so the marginal signals carry proportionally more weight. Stacking small advantages is the whole game, and this is one of them.
How to read your result
The checker highlights trigger phrases in the text and counts structural flags separately.
Clean means nothing in the wording or structure is working against you, and filters will judge the message on reputation and engagement instead. That is the correct outcome, not a high score.
Trigger words found highlights each phrase in place so you can judge it in context. Not every match needs removing: a word that genuinely belongs in a sentence about your product is different from the same word used as a sales flourish.
Structural flags are the ones worth more attention, because they weigh more than vocabulary. Excessive links, heavy formatting, all-caps runs and stacked punctuation are all inspected directly rather than scored loosely.
If the result is clean and your mail still lands in spam, the answer is not in this tool. It is in authentication, warmup or list quality, in that order.
What filters actually weigh, in order
| Signal | Weight | What you control |
|---|---|---|
| Sender reputation | Dominant | Warmup pace, volume consistency, bounce rate, complaint rate. |
| Recipient engagement | Dominant | Targeting and message quality. Replies are the strongest positive signal there is. |
| Authentication | Gate | SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Failing is costly; passing earns nothing on its own. |
| Links and tracked elements | Moderate | Link count, whether URLs are rewritten, remote images. |
| Structure and formatting | Small | HTML weight, caps, punctuation, image-to-text ratio. |
| Vocabulary | Smallest | The trigger phrases this tool highlights. |
Structural flags worth fixing
| Flag | Why it costs you | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Multiple links | Links are inspected and reputation-checked individually. | Zero on a first touch. Send the link in the reply. |
| Tracking pixel | A remote image loaded on open, which is exactly what bulk mail does. | Turn open tracking off. The number is untrustworthy anyway. |
| All caps | Scored directly, and read as shouting by people. | Remove. There is no cold email case for it. |
| Stacked punctuation | A classic bulk-mail marker. | One punctuation mark is plenty. |
| Heavy HTML or images | Image-to-text ratio is an old signal that still carries weight. | Plain text, or the lightest possible HTML. |
| Marketing footer | Bulk weight plus tracked links in one element. | A plain sentence offering an opt-out instead. |
How to diagnose mail landing in spam
In this order, because each step is more likely than the one after it.
- Check authentication on the sending domain. SPF, DKIM and DMARC all published and all passing. A failure here outweighs every other item on this page.
- Check the warmup schedule against actual volume. Sending ahead of the ramp is the most common cause of a sudden placement drop.
- Check bounce rate. Past 2%, placement problems follow, and no rewrite will fix them.
- Check link and image count in the message. This is where content genuinely matters.
- Then check wording. Run it through this tool, fix what is genuinely promotional, and leave what is simply accurate.
- Seed-test placement before and after. Otherwise you are changing things without knowing whether any of it helped.
Common questions about spam filters and wording
Do spam trigger words still matter?
Less than they did in 2010, more than nothing. Reputation and engagement dominate modern filtering, but trigger phrases still count at the margin and cold email lives at the margin. They also read as salesy to humans, so fixing one fixes the other.
What matters more, the wording or the links?
Links. A first touch with no link at all outperforms a clever one carrying a link, because links are what filters inspect and reputation-check. Earn the reply first, then send the link into a thread that already exists.
My email is clean and it still goes to spam.
Then wording was never the problem. Check authentication on the sending domain, whether warmup was rushed, and the bounce rate on the list. Content is close to the last thing filters weigh and almost always the first thing people rewrite.
Does including an unsubscribe line trigger filters?
No, and a plain-text opt-out sentence is safer than a marketing footer regardless. The risk was never the opt-out itself, it is the tracked, image-heavy footer that usually arrives attached to it.
Should I remove every flagged word?
No. Judge each one in context. A word that genuinely belongs in a sentence about what you do is different from the same word used as a flourish, and stripping accurate language to satisfy a word list makes the email vaguer without making it more deliverable.
Is plain text better than HTML for cold email?
Generally yes, because it is lighter, it carries no images and it looks like a message a person typed. The gap is smaller than people claim if your HTML is minimal and link-free. The thing that actually costs you is heavy HTML with images and tracked links, not the format itself.