What's inside the newsletter from Alternate

0 points out of 30 — met on 0 of the last 3 campaigns.

An invisible image tells the sending platform that the message was opened, when, and from which device: this is individual tracking of reading behavior, and the recipient sees none of it. The message does not say whether they consented or objected — that choice lives in the sending platform, not in the email.

Served from alternate.de.

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Met when no tracking pixel is present. A single pixel is enough for the criterion not to be met on an email.

7.5 points out of 15 — share of observations met across 11 campaigns.

Met when the message announces unsubscribing in its headers, through a page rather than an email to write, and in its body. The detail says which of the two is missing. Not applicable to a transactional email.

0 points out of 20 — share of observations met across 11 campaigns.

Two measures: does the unsubscribe link go through a tracker, and does a separate path lead to a preference center or to refusing tracking? Neither establishes that a refusal succeeds — checking would require following the link, which would record a click on the sending platform's side. They describe the control left to the recipient, not the result they would get.

15 points out of 15 — share of observations met across 11 campaigns.

A commercial email must make it possible to identify the advertiser (CPCE, article L. 34-5), and the recipient must be able to know who processes their data. This indicator groups what a message can show of it.

10 points out of 10 — met on 11 of 11 campaigns concerned.

Met when at least one link in the message leads to the brand's site without going through a click counter.

10 points out of 10 — met on 11 of 11 campaigns concerned.

Met when the recipient's address appears — neither in clear, nor encoded, nor hashed — in no URL and no proprietary header. Addressing headers do not count: they carry it by design.

20 points out of 20 — met on 11 of 11 campaigns concerned.

Met when our receiving server validated the DKIM signature of the email.

20 points out of 20 — met on 11 of 11 campaigns concerned.

Met when the domain shown in the sender matches the one that authenticated the message.

15 points out of 15 — met on 11 of 11 campaigns concerned.

Met when the published policy is “reject” or “quarantine”. A “none” policy asks nothing of mail providers: it is published with no effect on messages that impersonate the domain.

10 points out of 10 — met on 11 of 11 campaigns concerned.

Met when SPF does not fail. An SPF “none” alongside a valid DKIM and DMARC is a common and legitimate configuration: it is not penalized.

15 points out of 15 — share of observations met across 11 campaigns.

Met when the “List-Unsubscribe” header carries an https address and “List-Unsubscribe-Post” is exactly “List-Unsubscribe=One-Click”. This is what Gmail and Yahoo require of bulk senders: the mailbox's button then acts without opening a page. Not applicable to a transactional email.

5 points out of 5 — share of observations met across 11 campaigns.

What the signature covers, not only that it passes: an algorithm accepted by RFC 8301, the whole body signed, the From, Subject, Date and List-Unsubscribe headers signed, a signature not expired on receipt. Not applicable without a DKIM signature.

11.4 points out of 25 — met on 5 of 11 campaigns concerned.

Met when the HTML part stays under 102 KB. Beyond that, Gmail cuts off the end of the message — and the end is where the unsubscribe link and the notices are.

20 points out of 20 — share of observations met across 11 campaigns.

Met when layout tables are nested no more than 6 levels deep. Beyond that, the Word engine shared by desktop Outlook and the diverging clients each render the template their own way.

15 points out of 15 — share of observations met across 11 campaigns.

A doctype, a character set declared in the document, balanced tags and unique identifiers. Each client repairs incomplete markup its own way, which is what makes rendering unpredictable. End tags that HTML makes optional do not count.

10 points out of 10 — met on 11 of 11 campaigns concerned.

Met when no link is empty, reduced to “#” or written as “javascript:”. Such a link leads nowhere, and most clients neutralise it. Not applicable if the message contains no link.

0 points out of 10 — met on 0 of 11 campaigns concerned.

Met when the message calls no external stylesheet, through “link” or “@import”. Several clients never load them. A font stylesheet does not count: without it, the text falls back to another font.

5 points out of 5 — share of observations met across 11 campaigns.

Lines of 998 bytes at most, readable Message-ID and Date, a character set announced on every text part, a transfer encoding consistent with the content (RFC 5322, RFC 2045). Most servers tolerate these deviations, each in its own way.

25 points out of 25 — share of observations met across 11 campaigns.

Met when the message keeps at least 200 readable characters with images blocked, and a preheader of 40 to 130 characters announces it in the message list. Without a preheader, the inbox shows the first text of the body instead — often “View in browser”.

15 points out of 15 — share of observations met across 11 campaigns.

Met when a text version comes with the email and carries the essentials: at least 60% of its text and 80% of its links. A client that does not display HTML falls back on it; reduced to “view the web version”, it renders nothing.

10.9 points out of 15 — met on 8 of 11 campaigns concerned.

Met when no link is carried by a single image without alternative text: such a link leaves nothing on screen. Not applicable if the message contains no links.

10 points out of 10 — met on 11 of 11 campaigns concerned.

Met when no sized tap target falls below 24 px a side (WCAG 2.2, criterion 2.5.8). Only targets with a declared dimension are measured; the criterion's exceptions — a target within a line of text, sufficient spacing — are not. Not applicable if the message declares no dimensions.

17.7 points out of 20 — share of observations met across 11 campaigns.

Declared language, described content images, layout tables marked as such, link texts that say where they lead: what a screen reader needs to render the message. The detail says which of these measures is missing.

15 points out of 15 — share of observations met across 11 campaigns.

Met when the message declares its viewport and its adaptation to screen width. Without them, it displays on a phone at its original width, and is read by zooming and scrolling sideways.

0 points out of 5 — met on 0 of 11 campaigns concerned.

Earned when the message declares color-scheme or a prefers-color-scheme rule. No standard requires it — clients that force dark mode invert the colors themselves — but declaring it leaves control to the template rather than to the mail client.