Google Postmaster Tool: Access Control

Google Postmaster Tools is a free dashboard that shows how Gmail sees the email you send. It is the only place where Gmail itself tells you your spam rate and whether you meet its sender rules. This guide shows you how to set it up, what each dashboard means, and how to check it in a few minutes a day.

What Postmaster Tools shows you

Postmaster Tools reports on mail sent from your domain to Gmail users. It has these dashboards:

• Compliance status: whether you meet Gmail’s sender requirements, with a pass or fail for each one.
• Spam rate: the share of your inbox mail that Gmail users marked as spam.
• Feedback loop: spam rates per campaign, if you tag your emails with a Feedback-ID header (a label your sending platform adds to each campaign).
• Authentication: how much of your mail passes SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
• Encryption: how much of your mail travels over an encrypted connection (TLS).
• Delivery errors: how much of your mail Gmail rejected or delayed, and why.

It does not show where a single email landed, what each subscriber did, or why the filter judged a message the way it did.

About domain and IP reputation

Postmaster Tools used to rate your domain and sending IPs as High, Medium, Low or Bad. Google has announced that it is retiring these two reputation dashboards. Your account may still show them, or they may be gone. Don’t build your routine around them. Watch compliance status, spam rate, authentication and delivery errors.

Set up Postmaster Tools

You need a Google account and access to your domain’s DNS settings (usually at your domain registrar or hosting provider).

1. Sign in. Go to postmaster.google.com with any Google account.

2. Add your domain. Enter the domain that authenticates your mail: either your DKIM signing domain (the d= value in your DKIM signature) or your SPF domain (the domain in your Return-Path address). A shop that signs its mail as shop.example adds shop.example.

3. Copy the verification record. Google gives you a TXT or a CNAME record. A TXT record looks like this:

   Type:  TXT
   Host:  @
   Value: google-site-verification=abc123...

   Host: @ means the record goes on the domain itself. Value is a unique code that proves you control the domain.

4. Add the record to your DNS and save. You can confirm it’s live with Mailwel’s DNS lookup.

5. Verify. Go back to Postmaster Tools and click verify. It usually works at once, but the status can take a few minutes to update.

Once your main domain is verified, its subdomains don’t need verifying again. Add a subdomain such as news.shop.example only if you want to see its data on its own.

To give a colleague access, add their Google account in your domain’s user settings. Postmaster Tools doesn’t notify them, so tell them yourself.

Why you might see no data

• Your volume is too low. To protect users’ privacy, Google leaves out days when you send little mail to Gmail. Small senders often see empty dashboards. That’s normal.
• You added the wrong domain. If your email platform signs your mail with its own domain, the data goes to that domain. Set up DKIM with your own domain. The Mailwel test inbox shows which domain signs your mail.
• It’s too early. Data starts from the day you verify, and usually appears within 24 hours.

Reading the dashboards

Compliance status

This shows whether you meet each of Gmail’s sender requirements. For everyone, it covers SPF or DKIM, valid DNS records, message formatting, encryption and spam rate. For bulk senders (5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail users), it adds DMARC, one-click unsubscribe and honouring unsubscribes. Fix any failure here first.

Spam rate

This is the share of your inbox-delivered email that people reported with “Report spam”. Mail that Gmail filtered to spam on its own doesn’t count.

Spam rate	What it means	What to do
Below 0.1%	Healthy	Keep doing what you do
0.1% to 0.3%	Warning	Find out which emails cause complaints and fix them
0.3% or more	Breaks Gmail’s bulk sender rule	Act now: send only to engaged subscribers

The limit looks small, but at 0.3% of 100,000 emails, 300 people reported you. A single bad day isn’t a crisis. A spam rate that keeps rising is, and it usually comes before your mail starts landing in spam.

Authentication

This shows how much of your mail passes each check. Aim for 100% on all three.

• SPF (a DNS record listing the servers allowed to send for your domain). Below 100% means some mail comes from a server that isn’t listed.
• DKIM (a digital signature proving the email came from your domain, unchanged). Below 100% means some mail has a missing or broken signature.
• DMARC (a DNS record telling receivers what to do when checks fail). Below 100% means some mail fails alignment: neither the SPF nor the DKIM domain matches your From address. Someone may also be sending as your domain.

A short dip while you change DNS records, such as rotating DKIM keys, is normal. It should recover in a day or two.

Encryption

This shows how much of your mail uses TLS (encryption between mail servers). It should be 100%. Anything lower points to a problem with your sending server’s settings.

Delivery errors

This shows how much of your mail Gmail rejected or delayed, and why:

Reason	What it means	What to do
Rate limit exceeded	You’re sending too fast	Slow down and spread sends over time
Suspected spam	Gmail’s filters flagged your mail	Check your spam rate and recent changes
Bad or unsupported attachment	Gmail blocks that file type	Don’t attach executable files
DMARC policy	Your DMARC policy rejected unaligned mail	Find the source that isn’t aligned and fix it
Low IP or domain reputation	Gmail doesn’t trust your IP or domain	Send less, and only to engaged subscribers
Listed on a public blocklist	Your IP or domain is on a spam blocklist	Find the listing and request removal

A simple routine

Every day (two or three minutes)

Check	Act when	How fast
Compliance status	Any requirement fails	Same day
Spam rate	Above 0.1% / above 0.3%	Within 24 hours / right away
Authentication	Below 100%	Same day
Delivery errors	A new reason appears	Same day

Every week

Look at the last 7 and 30 days. Is the spam rate creeping up? Is it higher after certain kinds of email?

Link changes to your campaigns

Data arrives a day or two late. Note each campaign’s send date, then check two days later whether the spam rate or delivery errors moved. Over time you’ll learn which emails your readers like and which they report.

Common mistakes

• Reading “no data” as a problem. It only means your Gmail volume is too low to report.
• Panicking over one day. One day at 0.12% after weeks at 0.05% is noise. Watch the trend.
• Treating the dashboard as the whole story. Gmail’s filters use many more signals than it shows.

Checklist

• Add and verify your sending domain (your DKIM d= domain) in Postmaster Tools.
• Make sure your mail is DKIM-signed with your own domain, not your email platform’s.
• Add your team members who need access.
• Fix anything that fails in compliance status.
• Check spam rate, authentication and delivery errors every day.
• Keep your spam rate under 0.1%.
• Note your campaign dates and compare them with the data two days later.