email-best-practices

Use when building email features, emails going to spam, high bounce rates, setting up SPF/DKIM/DMARC authentication, implementing email capture, ensuring compliance (CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL), handling webhooks, retry logic, or deciding transactional vs marketing.

Quality

70%

Does it follow best practices?

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Adds up to 20 points to the overall score

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Securityby

Passed

No findings from the security scan

Fix and improve this skill with Tessl

tessl review fix ./.agents/skills/email-best-practices/SKILL.md

Quality

Content

57%

Reviews the quality of instructions and guidance provided to agents. Good implementation is clear, handles edge cases, and produces reliable results.

The SKILL.md body is a clean, well-organized overview that leans on external resource files for detail — but those referenced files are absent from the bundle, breaking the navigation it depends on. Sequences are clear but lack explicit validation checkpoints for risky batch sending.

Suggestions

Ship the referenced bundle: the nine ./resources/*.md files (deliverability, transactional-emails, compliance, etc.) are linked from the body but are not present, so every navigation path is currently a dead end.

Add explicit validation checkpoints for batch sending workflows (e.g. verify DNS records propagated, send a test message, check suppression list before a bulk send) so workflow_clarity reflects a real feedback loop.

Surface a small amount of directly actionable guidance inline (a minimal SPF/DKIM/DMARC record example or a retry/backoff snippet) so the skill is useful even before the reader opens a resource file.

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Conciseness	The body is lean — an ASCII architecture diagram, a compact Quick Reference table, and a short decision-tree 'Start Here' section — and it does not explain basic concepts Claude already knows; every section earns its place.	3 / 3
Actionability	It offers some concrete direction (e.g. 'authentication problems are the most common cause', the marketing path) but the detailed actionable guidance is delegated to nine ./resources/*.md links, so the in-file guidance is directional and incomplete rather than copy-paste ready.	2 / 3
Workflow Clarity	Sequences are present (Email Capture -> Compliance -> Marketing Emails; Sending Reliability -> Webhooks -> List Management) and the diagram shows a Suppression Check, but there are no explicit validation feedback loops for batch/destructive sending, which the rubric says caps this dimension at 2.	2 / 3
Progressive Disclosure	Although the in-file navigation is well-designed (one-level-deep, clearly signaled references in a table and decision tree), none of the nine referenced ./resources/*.md files exist in the bundle, so the progressive-disclosure structure resolves to dead ends; scored against the actual (empty) bundle structure as the rubric directs.	1 / 3
	Total	8 / 12 Passed

Description

82%

Based on the skill's description, can an agent find and select it at the right time? Clear, specific descriptions lead to better discovery.

A trigger-rich, email-specific description with strong natural keywords and clear distinctiveness. Its one weakness is that it leads with 'Use when...' and never explicitly states what the skill does or provides, leaving the 'what' implicit.

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Specificity	Lists multiple concrete actions/domains such as 'setting up SPF/DKIM/DMARC authentication', 'implementing email capture', 'ensuring compliance (CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL)', and 'handling webhooks, retry logic', matching the 'multiple specific concrete actions' anchor.	3 / 3
Completeness	The 'when' is answered explicitly and strongly via the 'Use when...' clause, but the 'what' (what the skill provides, e.g. best-practice guidance) is only implied through the trigger nouns rather than stated as a capability; it does not clearly answer both what AND when.	2 / 3
Trigger Term Quality	Covers natural terms a user would actually say — 'emails going to spam', 'high bounce rates', 'transactional vs marketing', plus the protocol/acronym names — giving good coverage rather than just jargon.	3 / 3
Distinctiveness Conflict Risk	The triggers are highly email-specific (SPF/DKIM/DMARC, CAN-SPAM/GDPR/CASL, bounce rates, transactional vs marketing), giving a clear niche that is unlikely to fire for unrelated skills.	3 / 3
	Total	11 / 12 Passed

Validation

93%

Warnings & errors only

Checks the skill against the spec for correct structure and formatting. All validation checks must pass before discovery and implementation can be scored.

Validation — 15 / 16 Passed

Validation for skill structure

Criteria	Description	Result
relative_links	Relative link issues: 19 missing	Warning

	Total	15 / 16 Passed

Repository: novuhq/novu
Path: .agents/skills/email-best-practices/SKILL.md
Commit: 67de0fa

Reviewed: about 14 hours ago

Table of Contents

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