[aspratley]

The spam that's being referred to is link spam i.e buying large numbers of links, comment spam etc in order to boost the target domain's search rankings. There's no one tool that will give you an exact answer regarding the domains penalty status. Putting the domain in something like ahrefs.com and looking at the linking domains and the anchor text section should give you a flavour though. If it's using spammy links you'll see things like lots of links in (poor quality) comments coming into the domain, links from unrelated or poor quality sites, lots of links targeting a specific phrase. If you see any links targeting pharmaceuticals or gambling that's usually a bad sign. Obviously you have to use your judgement when looking at these kind of reports - no one tool will be seeing the same dataset that google sees so it's possible it's missed a lot of links also legitimate sites suffer from scraping and apear on spammy sites so you have to look at the link profile as a whole rather than the odd bad link.