Melon Stork FAQ

Spammers and UBE'S(Unsolicited Bulk Emailers) can access this tool. However our systems can pick up when this tool is not being used for legitimate purposes. Furthermore if a spammer uses this tool it will provide us with information as to the email that spammers are planning to distribute. This will allow us to further refine the tool, with any feedback provided to SpamAssassin ensuring spam filtering gets even better.

Melon Media prides itself in being a credible and legitimate email marketing service provider. We service clients that utilise pre qualified SPAM Act compliant opt-in lists that are sourced legitimately. The recipients of our clients' emails have chosen to receive the relevant newsletters, notifications and so on. Spammers create a problem for the legitimate email market industry and we support all technological and legislative solution to the spam issue. We encourage and advise our clients on spam filtering technologies and tools.

Our development team actively monitor the use of the reports generated through Melon Stork and whenever we notice users employing techniques to try and get a low score for an email that obviously should be marked as spam, we rapidly create and deploy updated signatures matching those techniques to the anti-spam development teams.

Melon Stork is a tool that reviews an email and determines how likely it is for that email to get caught in a spam filter.

The tool then allows for adjustments of the email and re-testing.

The tool is aimed at web designers, marketing professionals, IT professionals or anyone else that is involved with legitimate email marketing or email broadcast campaigns.

Due to the problem of unsolicited bulk email, or SPAM, various technologies exist to filter out SPAM. None of these tools are perfect and they sometimes stop legitimate email, that is they generate "false positives".

Genuine marketers need a way of checking that their emails aren’t being tagged as false positives.

No. This is a totally standalone tool. You can use this tool whether you use BCC, a script, an internal system, or a competitors system to send out your email.

The melonMail system has a version of this tool integrated as a feature.

You provide content of your intended email (html or final form) and the email fields if you wish.

Then click on the analysis button to see the results. You can also choose to send yourself a copy of the report to your email.

We take privacy issues very seriously at Melon Media. The quality of our business is directly dependant on the security of our clients’ data.

This tool has been developed in-house and is hosted on our servers.No one other than staff has access to our systems, and even then only on a need to know basis.

Your email details are not stored by our systems, we merely get a notification when someone has used the system. We need to monitor the usage of the tool to ensure all is running smoothly.

The tool is based on SpamAssassin - a very popular open-source spam filter. Each element of the email, and content of the email is given a weighting if it is perceived to be something that “spammers” have been noted to do.

If your weighting goes above a certain level your legitimate email may be seen to “spam”.

We have set up this tool for a “worst case scenario”. In reality most tools are less stringent than the Melon Stork tool.

Problem elements are identified and noted. You can then adjust the content and retest.

No, this tool is available for free.

Email deliverability is influenced by several components including:

1) The content of your email.

2) The structure of your email.

3) The manner in which your email is sent, the type of system, the headers generated by the system, the “ip address” of the system.

4) The spam filters, firewalls and other systems on the email recipients end.

The Melon Stork tool deals only with issues 1 and 2. If your emails pass the Melon Stork test, but there are still problems, you need to look at issues 3 and 4.

3 main reasons.  

a. We believe that the best way of receiving is giving.

b. We think raising the awareness of the importance and challenge of the deliverability of emails is good for the legitimate email marketing industry.

c. We believe that we offer great services and products and that this tool may help with the exposure of our brand.

You can email us on or call us on 61 2 9232 3722 and we will be happy to help you. Please include as much details as possible with your questions.

We would also like to know if you indeed use this tool and find it helpful.