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Free spam word checker
See the wording and formatting that rule-based spam filters weight against your email. You get named faults with the rewrite for each, never a score.
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In short
- The free spam word checker from SmartReach.io reads the subject line and body of an email and reports the phrases, capitalisation, punctuation, links and hidden characters that rule-based spam filters weight against it. It tests 209 phrases in 9 groups and is ungated, with no signup and no limit on the number of messages checked.
- SmartReach.io is a cold email software with multichannel outreach capabilities via channels like email, LinkedIn, calls and WhatsApp. It publishes this checker free because the wording of a message is the last of the five signals that decide where it lands, and the other four are what SmartReach.io handles for a sending team.
- It returns findings, not a score. Every competing tool returns a number out of ten or a percentage inbox probability; none can be computed from text, because placement is decided by things that are not in the message.
- Wording is the fifth of the five signals that decide where an email lands. Ahead of it, in order: authentication, complaint rate, domain and IP reputation, and recipient engagement. A message with none of these words still goes to spam if the four above it are wrong.
- Since February 2024 Gmail and Yahoo have required bulk senders to publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC, offer one-click unsubscribe, and keep spam complaints under 0.3%. Neither provider's requirements mention vocabulary at all.
- The check runs entirely in your browser. There is no endpoint for the text to be sent to, so nothing you paste is transmitted, stored or logged, and the tool works with no network connection once the page has loaded.
- It carries 209 weighted phrases in 9 groups, scoped for B2B cold email rather than copied from consumer bulk-mail lists, plus checks no word list performs: zero-width characters, Latin look-alike letters from other alphabets, link shorteners, bare IP links, false Re: threading and a missing opt-out.
- It deliberately does not flag ordinary English. A single "free", one exclamation mark, and business acronyms such as CEO, ROI and B2B are not findings, and a checker that reports them cannot be trusted on the things that are.
This is an example, loaded so you can see what the tool does. Clear it and paste your own.
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12 findings
64 words · 19s read · 1 link
This reads the text and nothing else. Whether a message reaches the inbox is decided mainly by authentication, complaint rate and the sending domain’s reputation, all invisible from here.
This subject opens with Re: or Fwd:, which tells the recipient there is a thread they are already part of. On a first-touch cold email there is not. Mailbox providers detect the mismatch against the absence of a References header, and recipients who notice it report the message rather than ignoring it. A complaint costs the sending domain far more than a filtered message does.
Instead: Remove the prefix and write the subject the message actually deserves. If there genuinely is a prior thread, reply inside it so the headers are real.
https://bit.ly/3xamPleA shortener hides the destination from every filter that would otherwise evaluate it, so the only thing left to judge is the shortener itself, and shorteners are used far more by bulk mail than by anyone else. Shared domains also carry the reputation of everyone else using them, which is not a reputation you control.
Instead: Link the real URL. If you need click tracking, use a tracking domain on a subdomain of your own sending domain, so the reputation being spent is yours.
100% guaranteedabsolutely freeA promise about an outcome you do not control is the highest-weighted class here, and the one most likely to be true of a real sales email that is nonetheless filtered. It is also the class most likely to be a claim you cannot substantiate, which is a regulatory problem before it is a deliverability one.
Instead: State what you have measured instead of what you promise. "Teams like yours book 30% more meetings" is a claim you can source; "guaranteed results" is one nobody can, including you.
ACT NOWonce in a lifetimefor a limited timeAct nowbefore it's too lateexpires todayDeadline language is the most reliable single marker of a message written to be acted on before it is thought about, which is why rule sets weight it and why recipients report it. In cold email it is also usually false: there is no reason a stranger must reply today, and the reader knows it.
Instead: Take the deadline out unless it is real and you can name it. "Our next onboarding cohort starts on the 14th" carries no weight and is more persuasive than "act now" precisely because it is checkable.
Manufactured urgencyGuarantees and risk reversalMoney and discount language"Free" constructionsPressure calls to actionIndividually the phrases below are survivable. Filters score them cumulatively, so it is the combination that carries: urgency plus a guarantee plus a pressure call to action is the shape of the thing rule sets were written to catch, and a message can clear every rule separately while failing on the total.
Instead: Fix the highest-severity group first. Removing one whole group usually does more than trimming a word from each.
Click hereno obligationfree consultationdouble your income!!AMAZINGrevolutionaryexclusive dealACTNOWAMAZING
The four signals above this one
Wording is the last thing that decides placement. SmartReach.io is a cold email software that handles the four that come first: sending domains and mailboxes arrive with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured, warm up before the first send, and rotate across unlimited sending accounts.
14-day free trial · no credit card
209 phrases in 9 groups, each grouped by the reason it is weighted and scoped for B2B cold email, rather than a longer list padded with the consumer bulk-mail vocabulary of 2005, which a sales team never triggers.
The uncomfortable part
Do spam words actually send email to the spam folder?
Rarely, and almost never on their own. Wording is the fifth of the five things that decide where a message lands, and it is the only one of the five you can see from inside the text. That is why it gets the attention: not because it matters most, but because it is the one thing a writer can check without access to anything. Gmail's sender requirements and Yahoo's both name authentication, one-click unsubscribe and a complaint-rate threshold. Neither mentions vocabulary.
Authentication
SPF, DKIM and DMARC, aligned and passing. Since February 2024 Gmail and Yahoo require all three of anyone sending in bulk, and a domain that fails them is filtered before a word of the message is weighed.
Check all three →Complaint rate
The proportion of recipients who press the report button. Gmail names 0.3% as the level to stay under and 0.1% as the level to aim at. Nothing else on this list moves placement as fast, in either direction.
How reputation is built →Domain and IP reputation
The accumulated history of the domain and the address you send from: how long it has sent, how much, how steadily, and how people responded. A new domain sending at volume looks like a new domain sending at volume, whatever it says.
Warm up a sending domain →Engagement
Opens, replies, and the absence of deletes-without-reading. Relevance is a deliverability input, not only a conversion one, which is why a smaller and better-targeted list outperforms a larger one on placement as well as on replies.
Find the right recipients →The words in the messagewhat this tool reads
What this tool reads. Real, weighted by rule-based filters, and last. A message with none of these words still goes to spam if the four above are wrong, and a message with several arrives if they are right.
The practical consequence is a running order. If mail is going to spam and the records are not right, no amount of rewriting will fix it, and the rewrite will get the credit when the records are eventually fixed. That is how the belief that spam words are the problem survives. Check the three records first, then come back to the words. Our guide to which words trigger spam filters covers the middle three in depth.
209 phrases, 9 reasons
What counts as a spam trigger word, and why
Filters do not weight a word because it appears on a list. They weight it because of what it correlates with, and the correlation is different for each group below, which is why the rewrite is different too. Every published spam-word list is alphabetical, and alphabetical order is the one arrangement that hides the only thing worth knowing about any of these phrases.
Manufactured urgency
Deadline language is the most reliable single marker of a message written to be acted on before it is thought about, which is why rule sets weight it and why recipients report it. In cold email it is also usually false: there is no reason a stranger must reply today, and the reader knows it.
act nowact immediatelyapply nowbefore it is too latebefore it's too late+24 more
Instead: Take the deadline out unless it is real and you can name it. "Our next onboarding cohort starts on the 14th" carries no weight and is more persuasive than "act now" precisely because it is checkable.
Money and discount language
Price and cash vocabulary is heavily weighted because it is the payload of most unsolicited bulk mail. B2B senders trip it accidentally, usually in a sentence about ROI, and the fix is almost always to state the specific number instead of the adjective.
affordablebargainbest pricebig buckscash bonus+24 more
Instead: Replace the adjective with the number. "Cheap" and "huge savings" are weighted; "$400 a month less than what you pay now" is not, and it is the sentence that actually argues.
"Free" constructions
The word on its own is ordinary and appears in perfectly good email, including ours. What carries weight is the stacked construction, free plus a second promise, in a subject line, often capitalised. These are the stacked forms.
100% freefree accessfree consultationfree giftfree info+17 more
Instead: Unstack it. One "free" in a sentence about what the reader gets is ordinary language. "100% FREE trial, no obligation" is three signals wearing one coat.
Guarantees and risk reversal
A promise about an outcome you do not control is the highest-weighted class here, and the one most likely to be true of a real sales email that is nonetheless filtered. It is also the class most likely to be a claim you cannot substantiate, which is a regulatory problem before it is a deliverability one.
100% guaranteed100% satisfiedabsolutely freecertifiedguarantee+12 more
Instead: State what you have measured instead of what you promise. "Teams like yours book 30% more meetings" is a claim you can source; "guaranteed results" is one nobody can, including you.
Superlatives and hype
Weighted lightly on its own and heavily in combination. Its real cost is not the filter: superlatives are the register of advertising, and a cold email that reads as an advert gets the reply rate of one. This is the group most worth rewriting for reasons that have nothing to do with spam.
amazingas seen onaward winningaward-winningbest in class+31 more
Instead: Cut them. Every superlative here can be deleted with no loss of meaning, which is the test that identifies them: if the sentence survives the deletion intact, the word was decoration.
Pressure calls to action
Imperative click language is a bulk-mail fingerprint, and in a one-to-one email it is also the wrong ask. The alternative that reads as human and carries no weight at all is a question with a low cost of answering.
apply herebuy directbuy nowclick belowclick here+12 more
Instead: Ask a question instead of issuing an instruction. "Worth a look?" outperforms "Click here now" on reply rate and carries none of the weight.
Fake familiarity and false threading
Language that implies a relationship or a prior message that does not exist. This is the one group here with a legal dimension as well as a filtering one: under the CAN-SPAM Act a subject line that misrepresents the message is a violation in itself, and recipients who notice report the message rather than ignore it, which costs the sending domain far more than a filter ever does.
as discussedas per our conversationas promisedcircling backfollowing up on our call+13 more
Instead: Only claim a prior conversation that happened. If this is the first message, say so. An honest opening line costs a fraction of what a complaint costs, and the opening is where trust is decided.
Opportunity and recruitment-scheme language
The vocabulary of multi-level marketing and advance-fee fraud. Weighted heavily by every rule set because the correlation is close to perfect, and a legitimate sender who uses it inherits the whole weight.
be your own bossbusiness opportunityearn from homeextra cashfinancial independence+15 more
Instead: Rewrite in the vocabulary of the reader’s job rather than of an offer. Anything that would fit in an advert for working from home belongs nowhere near a B2B first touch.
Legacy consumer-spam vocabulary
The 2005 bulk-mail vocabulary that every published spam-word list still carries. A B2B sender will almost never trigger these, and when one appears it is usually a coincidence of subject matter rather than a problem. Kept, and kept separate, because rule-based filters do still weight them and dropping them silently would misrepresent what those filters see.
casinocuresdietgamblinglose weight+16 more
Instead: Usually nothing to do. Check the phrase is actually about your subject matter and move on; if it is incidental, a synonym removes the match at no cost.
The group that matters most is guarantees and risk reversal, and it is the one where the fix is a decision rather than a synonym. It is also the only group here besides false threading with a regulatory edge: a promise you cannot substantiate is a problem under consumer protection law before it is a problem for a filter. The FTC's CAN-SPAM guide sets out what commercial email must and must not do.
Five steps
How to check an email for spam words
Paste the subject line and the body into the SmartReach.io spam word checker above, fix the findings marked worth fixing, and re-check. The step most people miss is the third one. Filters score cumulatively, so removing one whole group of language beats trimming a single word out of five different groups, and the tool groups the findings that way for exactly that reason.
Paste the subject line and the body
Both, not just the body. Subject-line wording is weighted more heavily than the same words further down, and it is the only part a recipient reads before deciding. Nothing you paste is transmitted, because the check runs in your own browser.
Read the findings marked "Worth fixing" first
They are ordered by severity rather than by where they appear. A false Re: prefix or a link shortener costs more than three superlatives, and the order reflects that.
Fix whole groups, not single words
Filters score cumulatively, so a message can clear every rule separately and still fail on the total. Removing one entire group, every urgency phrase for example, does more than trimming one word from each of five groups.
Re-read the subject line on its own
Cut it to about 40 characters. That is not a filtering signal, it is where most mobile clients stop showing the line, so anything past it is written for nobody.
Then check the four signals that outrank wording
Authentication, complaint rate, sending domain reputation and engagement all decide placement before a word is weighed. If a message is being filtered, start with the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records rather than the copy.
The full list
Every spam trigger word this checker tests
All 209 phrases the SmartReach.io spam word checker matches, in the 9 groups it sorts them into, each with the rewrite that group calls for. They are scoped for B2B cold email rather than copied from consumer bulk-mail lists, which is why the count is smaller than the longest published lists and why more of it applies to a message you would actually send. For the subject in general rather than this tool, our guide to which words trigger spam filters covers it properly.
Manufactured urgency29 phrases
Deadline language is the most reliable single marker of a message written to be acted on before it is thought about, which is why rule sets weight it and why recipients report it. In cold email it is also usually false: there is no reason a stranger must reply today, and the reader knows it.
Instead: Take the deadline out unless it is real and you can name it. "Our next onboarding cohort starts on the 14th" carries no weight and is more persuasive than "act now" precisely because it is checkable.
act nowact immediatelyapply nowbefore it is too latebefore it's too latecall nowdon't deletedo not deletedon't hesitateexpires todayexpires soonfinal noticefor a limited timehurryimmediate actioninstant accesslast chancelimited offerlimited timeno time to wasteoffer expiresonce in a lifetimeonly a few leftonly todayright awaytime is running outurgentwhile supplies lastwhile stocks last
Money and discount language29 phrases
Price and cash vocabulary is heavily weighted because it is the payload of most unsolicited bulk mail. B2B senders trip it accidentally, usually in a sentence about ROI, and the fix is almost always to state the specific number instead of the adjective.
Instead: Replace the adjective with the number. "Cheap" and "huge savings" are weighted; "$400 a month less than what you pay now" is not, and it is the sentence that actually argues.
affordablebargainbest pricebig buckscash bonuscheapcredit carddiscountdouble your incomeearn extra cashearn moneyextra incomefast cashfinancial freedomfor just $get paidhuge savingslowest pricemake moneymillion dollarsno costno feesprice protectionsave bigsave up toserious cashspecial promotionunlimited earnings$$$
"Free" constructions22 phrases
The word on its own is ordinary and appears in perfectly good email, including ours. What carries weight is the stacked construction, free plus a second promise, in a subject line, often capitalised. These are the stacked forms.
Instead: Unstack it. One "free" in a sentence about what the reader gets is ordinary language. "100% FREE trial, no obligation" is three signals wearing one coat.
100% freefree accessfree consultationfree giftfree infofree installationfree investmentfree membershipfree moneyfree offerfree previewfree quotefree samplefree trial offerfreebieget it freeno cost or obligationno obligationrisk-freerisk freetotally freetry it free
Guarantees and risk reversal17 phrases
A promise about an outcome you do not control is the highest-weighted class here, and the one most likely to be true of a real sales email that is nonetheless filtered. It is also the class most likely to be a claim you cannot substantiate, which is a regulatory problem before it is a deliverability one.
Instead: State what you have measured instead of what you promise. "Teams like yours book 30% more meetings" is a claim you can source; "guaranteed results" is one nobody can, including you.
100% guaranteed100% satisfiedabsolutely freecertifiedguaranteeguaranteedmoney backmoney-backno catchno credit checkno hidden costsno hidden feesno questions askedno strings attachedpromise yourefundsatisfaction guaranteed
Superlatives and hype36 phrases
Weighted lightly on its own and heavily in combination. Its real cost is not the filter: superlatives are the register of advertising, and a cold email that reads as an advert gets the reply rate of one. This is the group most worth rewriting for reasons that have nothing to do with spam.
Instead: Cut them. Every superlative here can be deleted with no loss of meaning, which is the test that identifies them: if the sentence survives the deletion intact, the word was decoration.
amazingas seen onaward winningaward-winningbest in classbest-in-classbrand newbreakthroughcutting edgecutting-edgedream come trueexclusive dealgame changergame-changergame changingincrediblejaw-droppinglife changinglife-changingmiracleno.1number oneonce-in-a-lifetimeone of a kindoutstandingrevolutionarysensationalskyrocketstate of the artstate-of-the-artunbelievableunbeatableunlimitedworld classworld-class#1
Pressure calls to action17 phrases
Imperative click language is a bulk-mail fingerprint, and in a one-to-one email it is also the wrong ask. The alternative that reads as human and carries no weight at all is a question with a low cost of answering.
Instead: Ask a question instead of issuing an instruction. "Worth a look?" outperforms "Click here now" on reply rate and carries none of the weight.
apply herebuy directbuy nowclick belowclick hereclick nowclick this linkdo it todayget started noworder noworder todaypurchase nowregister nowsign up freesubscribe nowtake action nowvisit our website
Fake familiarity and false threading18 phrases
Language that implies a relationship or a prior message that does not exist. This is the one group here with a legal dimension as well as a filtering one: under the CAN-SPAM Act a subject line that misrepresents the message is a violation in itself, and recipients who notice report the message rather than ignore it, which costs the sending domain far more than a filter ever does.
Instead: Only claim a prior conversation that happened. If this is the first message, say so. An honest opening line costs a fraction of what a complaint costs, and the opening is where trust is decided.
as discussedas per our conversationas promisedcircling backfollowing up on our callfollowing up on our conversationas we discussedper my last emailper our conversationper our discussionreattachingre-attachingresending thissorry i missed youthanks for your time yesterdayyou requestedyou signed upas requested
Opportunity and recruitment-scheme language20 phrases
The vocabulary of multi-level marketing and advance-fee fraud. Weighted heavily by every rule set because the correlation is close to perfect, and a legitimate sender who uses it inherits the whole weight.
Instead: Rewrite in the vocabulary of the reader’s job rather than of an offer. Anything that would fit in an advert for working from home belongs nowhere near a B2B first touch.
be your own bossbusiness opportunityearn from homeextra cashfinancial independenceget richhome based businesshome-based businessincredible opportunitymake $multi level marketingmulti-level marketingno experience neededopportunity of a lifetimepassive incomepotential earningswork from homeyou have been selectedyou were selectedyou've been chosen
Legacy consumer-spam vocabulary21 phrases
The 2005 bulk-mail vocabulary that every published spam-word list still carries. A B2B sender will almost never trigger these, and when one appears it is usually a coincidence of subject matter rather than a problem. Kept, and kept separate, because rule-based filters do still weight them and dropping them silently would misrepresent what those filters see.
Instead: Usually nothing to do. Check the phrase is actually about your subject matter and move on; if it is incidental, a synonym removes the match at no cost.
casinocuresdietgamblinglose weightlotterylowest insurance ratesmedicinemortgage ratesno medical examsonline pharmacyprescriptionrefinanceremoves wrinklesstock alertthis is not spamvaliumviagraweight losswinneryou are a winner
A phrase on this list is not a phrase you must never write. It is a phrase that carries weight, and weight only decides an outcome in combination and when the four signals above wording are already weak. The checker above marks severity for that reason, and the groups here are ordered by the reason they are weighted rather than alphabetically, because the rewrite is different for each and an A-to-Z list hides that.
Deliberate omissions
What this spam checker will not tell you
Four things this tool refuses to do, each of which every competing checker does. They are refusals rather than missing features: each one would require inventing an answer from information the tool does not have.
It will not give you a number out of ten
A score computed from vocabulary looks like a probability of reaching the inbox and is not one. It also invites the wrong work: optimising a number down by swapping synonyms, while the thing actually filtering the message is untouched.
It will not tell you whether you will land in the inbox
Nothing that reads only your text can. Placement depends on your domain’s history with each receiver, and two identical messages from two different domains routinely land in different folders.
It cannot see what a receiver sees first
A pasted message has no headers. Authentication results, List-Unsubscribe, the sending IP and the return path are all invisible here, and all of them are weighed before the body is.
It is not a seed-list placement test
Sending to a panel of real mailboxes at each provider is the only way to observe placement, and it is a different tool with a different cost. Where this one gives an opinion about placement, it is telling you it cannot.
The one worth reading twice is the score. A number out of ten invites the wrong work: it can be moved by swapping synonyms until it looks better, while the thing actually filtering the message is untouched. It will look better, because the number was only ever counting words. A tool that produces a satisfying number without changing an outcome is worse than no tool, because it ends the investigation.
Not findings
What this checker deliberately does not flag
Published spam-word lists are padded with ordinary English, and a checker that flags it trains writers to avoid perfectly good sentences for no gain. These are the matches this tool declines to make, and the reason for each.
| Not flagged | Why not |
|---|---|
| free | On its own, in a sentence about what the reader gets, it is ordinary language and appears in plenty of mail that arrives. Only the stacked constructions are flagged. |
| One exclamation mark | A single mark in a whole message is not a signal. Three, or any doubled run, is. |
| CEO, ROI, B2B | Business acronyms are not shouting, and a checker that says they are has not been read carefully enough to trust on anything else. |
| Your first name in the subject | Personalisation tokens are not weighted. A token that failed to merge and shipped as {{first_name}} is a different problem, and a human one. |
| Long words, passive voice, reading level | Writing quality is worth attention, and no spam filter measures it. Anything here that mentions how the message reads says plainly that it is a persuasion point, not a deliverability one. |
The rule behind the whole list: a check earns its place by being actionable and by being right often enough to be believed. The first time a tool flags "free" inside "freelance", everything else it says stops counting, and it should.
Take it with you
Put this spam word checker on your own site
Free to embed, on any site, with no permission needed and nothing to sign. It carries a visible credit back here, which is the whole arrangement. The check still runs inside the reader's own browser, so an embedded copy transmits nothing either and does exactly what this one does.
The four signals above this one
Wording is the last thing to check, not the first
If a message is being filtered, the odds are it is not the words. These read the things that decide it before anyone reads a sentence: whether the sending domain is authenticated, which servers may send as you, and what a receiver does when a check fails.
All three records, one pass
Email Authentication Checker
Check SPF, DKIM and DMARC on any domain at once. See which of the three are missing, which are broken, and which are published but not actually enforcing anything.
What it looks like
SPF pass · DKIM pass · DMARC p=reject
Which servers may send as you
SPF Checker
SPF lists the servers allowed to send mail for your domain. Check that yours is published, resolves, and stays under the ten-lookup limit that silently breaks it.
What it looks like
v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all
What happens when a check fails
DMARC Checker
DMARC tells receivers whether to quarantine or reject mail that fails SPF and DKIM, and where to send the reports. Check your policy, alignment and reporting address.
What it looks like
v=DMARC1; p=reject; pct=100
Or fix the four that come first
Sending domains that arrive already authenticated
SmartReach.io is a cold email software with multichannel outreach capabilities via channels like email, LinkedIn, calls and WhatsApp. It handles the four signals that wording sits behind. Sending domains and mailboxes are bought and authenticated for you, warmed before the first send, and rotated across unlimited sending accounts, so the message you just rewrote arrives from a domain the receiver already trusts.
- Sending domains and mailboxes bought and authenticated in minutes, no IT ticket
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured for you on every sending domain
- Warmup, inbox rotation and ESP matching across unlimited sending accounts
- Every address verified free before a campaign sends, so bounces never touch your domain
“This software is focused on the end receiver as much as the user.”Matt McQuin · Co-founder, ColdlyticsThe sender requirements on this page are taken from Google's and Yahoo's own published guidance for bulk senders, the compliance points from the FTC's CAN-SPAM guide, and one-click unsubscribe from RFC 8058. The phrase groups follow the categories rule-based filters such as SpamAssassin score on, scoped for B2B cold email. Last reviewed . The check runs in your own browser and nothing you paste is transmitted or stored.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Spam word questions, answered
Rewriting the email is the last thing that fixes deliverability.
SmartReach.io buys and authenticates your sending domains and mailboxes with SPF, DKIM and DMARC already in place, then warms them, rotates them, and verifies every address before you send.