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One of our clients called Tech Support recently, suspecting something might be broken with our built-in email content checker.   The problem?  Her message's SpamAssassin score was too good.  She had never before seen a perfect score of 0.0 and wondered, "Did you guys change something?"

Actually, we did (thanks for noticing!).  Our content checker formerly used a SpamAssassin server hosted by a 3rd-party, but we recently brought that service in-house.  We're now running our own SpamAssassin service in the Delivra data center, to give us more control over the scores being returned to our users.  Running a local SpamAssassin server also allows us to store your content analysis results in our database, so that we can display them to any administrator who reviews a message in the Mailings::Approvals queue:

SpamAssassin results link for mailings pending approval

But our user who called didn't see a perfect score because we're rigging the results to make her mailings look better, and no, we haven't started grading email content on a curve.   We're merely running the most current version of SpamAssassin (v. 3.2.5) in its  out-of-the-box configuration.   As a result of this change, most of our clients did see their anti-spam scores improve for a couple of reasons.

One reason is that SpamAssassin 3.2 has retired certain tests that are no longer considered relevant, such as the one that would assign 0.2 points if the <tbody> HTML tag was present.  The other is that we chose not to report on certain tests that contribute only one one-thousandth of a point (0.001) to the overall score.  If you're actually worried about the fact that SpamAssassin adds 0.001 to your score just because the message contains HTML, then I dare say you're focusing on the wrong things.

So, congratulations are order for our client.  Nothing's wrong with the system; hers was a decidedly non-spammy-looking mailing.  But still, a caution is in order: content is only one factor affecting delivery or non-delivery of your message.   A perfect SpamAssassin score can't hurt, but check out these other posts for more advice on getting mail delivered.

Chris Broshears | Product Development