Google Postmaster Tools, explained: every dashboard and what to do

What Google Postmaster Tools is#

Google Postmaster Tools is Google’s free dashboard for people who send email to Gmail. Once you prove you own a sending domain, it shows you how Gmail sees the mail from that domain: whether you meet Gmail’s sender requirements, how often recipients report you as spam, whether your mail authenticates, whether it is encrypted in transit, and why any of it was rejected.^[1][4]

It is the closest thing a sender has to Gmail’s own view, and it has hard edges worth knowing before you read a single chart:

• Personal Gmail only. “Data in Postmaster Tools only applies to messages sent to personal Gmail accounts” — addresses ending in @gmail.com or @googlemail.com. Mail to companies on Google Workspace is not in it.^[2]
• Daily, not live. “Typically, the data is updated within 24 hours but can take longer”, and days are in UTC.^[1]
• Volume-gated. To protect Gmail users’ privacy, dashboards “might not include all data on days when your outgoing email volume is low.”^[1] A small sender may see empty charts for weeks.
• Up to 120 days back. Each dashboard shows the last 7, 30, 60, 90 or 120 days.^[1]

Google recommends that senders use it to make sure they meet the requirements in its sender guidelines,^[3] and M3AAWG, the industry’s anti-abuse working group, lists it among the reputation-monitoring tools in its Sender Best Common Practices.^[4] For the wider picture of what those numbers feed into, see the deliverability guide.

Postmaster Tools v2: what changed, and what is still changing#

Google launched a new version of Postmaster Tools, v2, in 2024, with a new interface and a Compliance status dashboard. It has said the old interface (v1) “will eventually be retired” — and, after feedback from senders, that it is “postponing the deprecation of the legacy Postmaster Tools web interface.” No date is published.^[5]

The API moved too. The Postmaster Tools API v2 is available and v1 “will be retired”; v2 covers everything v1 did except domain and IP reputation, and adds compliance status and batch queries.^[5] At the time of writing (28 September 2026), Google’s dashboards reference still documents the reputation ratings, so this guide explains them below — but do not build a process on a chart Google has said it will remove.^[1]

How to set up Google Postmaster Tools#

Setup takes a few minutes and one DNS record. You need a Google Account or a Google Workspace account.^[2]

1. Add the domain that authenticates your mail. Sign in at postmaster.google.com and add either your DKIM signing domain (the d= value) or your SPF Return-Path domain. If they are the same domain, Postmaster Tools uses mail authenticated by either.^[2]
2. Verify it with DNS. Copy the TXT or CNAME record Google gives you, add it at your DNS host, and click Verify. Verification is usually immediate but “can take up to 10 minutes”; Postmaster Tools shows no data until it succeeds.^[2]
3. Add subdomains you send from. A subdomain added after its verified primary domain needs no verification of its own, and gets its own dashboards.^[2]
4. Give your team access. Under Manage users, add colleagues by their Google address. Google does not tell them, so tell them yourself.^[2]

If you send through Rasket, the domain to add is the one you verified with us: mail is DKIM-signed with that domain’s own key, so it is the d= domain Postmaster Tools wants. If you send from a subdomain such as mail.example.com, add it separately to see its data on its own. How the records fit together is covered in email domain verification and verified domains.

The Postmaster Tools dashboards, one by one#

Compliance status#

The dashboard to open first. It lists Gmail’s requirements for every sender — SPF and DKIM authentication, DNS records, message formatting, encryption and user-reported spam rate — and three more for bulk senders: DMARC authentication, one-click unsubscribe and honouring unsubscribes. Each shows Compliant, Needs work or No data found.^[1] A bulk sender is anyone sending about 5,000 messages or more to personal Gmail accounts in a day, counted across the primary domain and its subdomains, and the status is permanent once reached.^[6]

Two quirks cause most confusion. The status is for the primary domain only, though it uses data from its subdomains; and it is a rolling average over several days, so after a fix Google says to check back after 7 days.^[1] “Honor unsubscribe: Needs work” usually means unsubscribes were not processed within 48 hours — and Google counts a request as made even if something in front of your servers blocked it.^[1] Beneath the list, the Deliverability analysis tool gives a recommendation when you send too little, fail to deliver, exceed the spam threshold or fall short of the guidelines.^[1]

Feedback loop#

The spam rate split by campaign. It only works if you add a Feedback-ID header to your mail, in the form a:b:c:SenderId, with up to three identifiers of your own choosing (a campaign, a customer, a mail type) and a mandatory sender identifier of 5 to 15 characters. The header must be covered by a DKIM signature from a domain you have verified in Postmaster Tools.^[7]

Feedback-ID: spring-sale:newsletter:marketing:examplecorp

An identifier appears only when it has enough volume and enough spam reports on a given day, so an empty dashboard can mean nothing is wrong.^[7] Never use a value unique to each message, such as a Message-ID; Google aggregates by identifier and a unique one aggregates nothing.^[7]

Authentication#

The share of mail with your domain in the From header that passes SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Google’s benchmark: senders “typically achieve 95% or higher success rates for DKIM and DMARC when these methods are set up correctly. SPF success rates tend to be lower”, often because of mail sent by third parties.^[1] Forwarding and mailing lists also lower the numbers, and you cannot control either. A DMARC rate below DKIM’s usually means alignment is failing: the mail authenticates, but not as the domain in the From header. See DKIM, SPF and DMARC explained.

Encryption#

The share of your mail that reached Gmail over TLS (outbound), and of Gmail’s mail to you that did (inbound).^[1] Anything below 100% outbound deserves a look; Google lists auto-forwarding servers without TLS, invalid or expired certificates and outdated TLS versions as the usual causes. Gmail requires every sender to use TLS.^[8]

IP and Domain reputation (being retired)#

A rating of Bad, Low, Medium or High for your sending domains and IPs, based on DKIM- authenticated mail (or SPF-authenticated, if you do not use DKIM). Google defines High as a “history of very low spam rates” with compliance with its guidelines, and Bad as a history of sending a high volume of spam, mail that is “almost always marked as spam or rejected”.^[1] If you still see it, treat it as a lagging summary of the spam rate rather than a target — which is the reason Google gave for removing it.^[5] On a shared pool, the IP rating belongs to the pool, not to you.

Reading the spam rate correctly#

The spam rate is the number that decides the most, and the easiest to misread. Google defines it as “the percent of your messages that are delivered to engaged recipient’s Inbox and then marked as spam by the recipient”, measured on DKIM-authenticated mail.^[1]

Because only inbox-delivered mail counts, a low number is not always good news. Google’s own troubleshooting says that if Gmail is already sending much of your mail to spam, the rate “might seem low, because recipients get fewer of your messages in their Inbox”, and that a high rate that suddenly drops to 0% can mean exactly that.^[1] Read the spam rate beside your own Gmail open rates: a falling spam rate with falling opens is a warning, not a recovery.

When the rate is high, Google’s advice is consistent across every case: send only to people who opted in, confirm addresses before subscribing them, stop mailing people who never open, make unsubscribing easy, and use feedback IDs to find which mail draws the reports — then wait, because improvements can take up to 7 days to show.^[1] See complaint rate and how double opt-in works.

Delivery errors and what to do about each#

The Delivery errors dashboard shows the share of authenticated mail Gmail rejected or temporarily failed, with the reason.^[1] Google publishes a response for each:

Temporary failures are Gmail’s throttle. Google recommends exponential backoff and, as a best practice, to “completely stop sending for a short period of time, then resume sending at a slower rate”; ignoring temp fails tends to end in permanent ones.^[1] The same pattern is the core of a warm-up — see how to warm up a new domain or IP address. If a problem persists after you meet the guidelines, a verified domain owner can file a report from Postmaster Tools, but only for mail that is DKIM and SPF authenticated with a From domain that matches.^[9]

A weekly Google Postmaster Tools routine#

Postmaster Tools is most useful as a habit rather than a place to look after something has gone wrong. The routine below takes about ten minutes a week.

1. 1

   Verify every sending domain

   Add the DKIM or SPF Return-Path domain of each mail stream, subdomains included, at postmaster.google.com, and verify it with the TXT or CNAME record Google gives you.

2. 2

   Open Compliance status first

   Confirm every requirement reads Compliant. Fix anything marked Needs work, then check again after 7 days, because the dashboard uses a rolling average over several days.

3. 3

   Read the spam rate day by day

   Look at each day rather than the average and keep it below 0.1%. Read it beside your Gmail open rates: a low spam rate with falling opens can mean Gmail is filtering you.

4. 4

   Check authentication and encryption

   DKIM and DMARC should pass for 95% or more of the mail with your domain in the From header, and outbound TLS should be at 100%.

5. 5

   Scan delivery errors for anything new

   Look for spikes and new reasons, and apply Google's action for each: slow down after rate limits, add a missing PTR record, read your DMARC reports, or ask a blocklist operator for removal.

6. 6

   Trace complaints to campaigns

   If the spam rate rises, use Feedback-ID values in the Feedback loop dashboard to find the campaign responsible, and stop mailing the segment that drew the reports.

Getting the data out: the Postmaster Tools API#

To chart the numbers beside your own, or alert on them, use the Postmaster Tools API. It returns the statistics the dashboards show, including spam rate and delivery errors, after a one-time setup: a Google Cloud project with the API enabled, OAuth credentials, and the same verified domain.^[10]

Version 2 replaced v1’s per-day trafficStats calls with domains.domainStats.query, which takes a date range, and added domains.getComplianceStatus for SPF, DKIM and DMARC compliance and domainStats.batchQuery for several domains in one call.^[11] A query for one week, adapted from Google’s own migration guide:

stats = service.domains().domainStats().query(
    parent="domains/" + domain_name,
    startDate={"year": 2026, "month": 9, "day": 1},
    endDate={"year": 2026, "month": 9, "day": 7},
).execute()

If you have code on v1, migrate it: Google has said v1 will be retired, and the domain and IP reputation fields are not coming with it.^[5]

What Postmaster Tools does not show#

Postmaster Tools sees one mailbox provider’s consumer mail. For the rest you need other sources:

• Outlook.com: Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) gives the owner of an IP range daily data per address, including a filter result: green when under 10% of recipients got a spam verdict, yellow between 10% and 90%, red above 90%. Data may be missing for an IP that sent fewer than 100 messages that day. It is for people who control the IPs, which on a shared pool is your provider.^[12]
• Yahoo and AOL: Yahoo’s Sender Hub runs a Complaint Feedback Loop for DKIM-signing domains and asks bulk senders to keep their spam rate below 0.3%.^[13]
• Your own events. Bounces, complaints, opens and clicks per message, from every provider at once. In Rasket, the Metrics page shows deliverability, bounce, complaint, open and click rates by period and by domain, and every message produces delivery events you can receive as webhooks.

None of these tells you which folder a message landed in; Postmaster Tools does not either. Where Gmail files delivered mail is the subject of our guide to getting out of the Gmail Promotions tab.

Google Postmaster Tools myths#

• Documented by Google “A 0% spam rate means everything is fine.” Not necessarily: if Gmail is filtering your mail to spam, few recipients see it to report it, and the rate drops.^[1]
• Documented by Google “High domain reputation guarantees the inbox.” Google calls reputation “only one of many factors affecting deliverability”, and is retiring the dashboard.^[5]
• Documented by Google “It covers everyone on Google’s mail servers.” Only personal Gmail accounts; Google Workspace recipients are not included.^[2]
• Documented by Google “A fix shows up the next day.” Data usually lags by up to 24 hours, and Compliance status can take 7 days to change.^[1]
• Documented by Google “My spam rate should match my other tools.” Google says third-party reports “will typically differ”, because Gmail uses its own data and other factors.^[1]
• Unproven “Empty dashboards mean Google is ignoring my domain.” More often the volume is too low for Google to show data without compromising users’ privacy.^[2]