"An update about your account" scored 100 out of 100. It says nothing, and Orbit called it sharp
The subject-line scorer got a jargon detector in 0.34.0, and a line can be empty without containing a single word of jargon. "An update about your account" is grammatical, the right length, punctuated correctly and carries no buzzword to catch — so it sailed through at 100/sharp. It scores 66/risky now, on a rule that looks for evidence rather than banning words: a line is empty when every token either is a grammatical stopword or names only the existence of a message (update, notice, details, account; important, quick, latest), and there is no number, date, currency or personalisation token anywhere in it. Direction matters more than the list. A word the vocabulary has never seen counts as evidence and clears the line, which is why "Update: your refund cleared" still scores 100 — same word, different line. The fix is deliberately partial, and the honest version is below: one ordinary noun clears the check, so "Your weekly report is ready" is empty by the same definition and still scores 100.
What shipped
•Bug fix — orbit_score_subject_line now catches a line that names a category of content instead of the content. Measured on 36 good lines and 11 empty ones: zero false positives, and every good line scored 100 rather than merely staying in the top tier, because "still sharp" would have hidden a slow leak. The penalty is withheld when a filler or empty-promise phrase was already named — that is the same fault at a finer grain, and charging twice pushed a merely-vague line into the tier reserved for spam, which is a lie about what is wrong with it.
•An allowlist of non-evidence, not a list of banned words. A blocklist fails dangerously in both directions: an unlisted word slips through, and a listed word inside good copy is a false positive. This fails safe — the unfamiliar is exonerated. Emptiness is a property of the whole line, never of a word in it.
•Partial by design, and worth knowing before you rely on it. "Your weekly report is ready" and "An update about your subscription details" are empty by the same definition and still score 100, because one ordinary noun is enough to clear the line. The stricter version was built and thrown away: flagging unless a line carries an anchor, a consequence verb or a proper noun closes the gap and false-positives on 8 of 36 good lines — 22%, including the sharpest line in Orbit's own README. Because the coverage hole is real, the tool still does not advertise a content-emptiness check; that claim came down in 0.33.1 and stays down until the second half exists. This is the extension tool only — the free subject-line web app scores on the older logic and will disagree with it.