How to assess an unknown journal's quality? [I apologize if it has been asked, I think it must have been but I couldn't find a similar question.]

I often receive invitations / calls for papers to write papers in journals. 95% of these cases are obvious spam publications, but in about 5% I see a letter that's not entirely generic, e.g. they mention my previous publications in the subject** and they write something that appears genuine about the publication. They also write the name of the editor in chief. 

My question is how to assess this new journal's quality? I mean, nice journal pop up once in a while and just because it's a new journal, does not mean it's necessarily "fake news". 

Here are a few points I thought about:


Wait a few months/years until I see reputable people publish in it, but then I will have missed my shot, possibly.
Inspect the editor's reputation. If she/he appears reputable (e.g. have published in journals I know to be good), then the journal is okay.
Inspect the publisher's "parents", for example if it's ACM, Springer, IEEE, etc., then maybe it's worthwhile (but then, I can't say definitively either way).


I would appreciate any points on the subject.

** yes, these messages can nevertheless be generated automatically.
When 95% is junk and the other 5% is sufficiently irrelevant that neither you or your supervisor and colleagues know about them, a safe and efficient strategy is to ignore all journals that actively request contributions.

I have also never heard of a legitimate journal using mass emailing to recrute editors (this is more a habit of author-pay open access journals that are looking to increase their market share).

Yes this strategy, if adopted broadly, would prevent some new journals from being known. The good news is: we already have way more journals than we could possibly wish for. It's good content and quality curation we're short of.