Google Postmaster Tools is a free Google dashboard showing how Gmail treats mail from your domain. Add the domain you use for SPF or DKIM, prove you own it with a TXT or CNAME record, then watch the spam rate: Google says keep it under 0.1% and never let it reach 0.3%.
| Item | What Google says |
|---|---|
| Spam rate goal | Below 0.1% |
| Spam rate ceiling | Never 0.3% or higher |
| Bulk sender | About 5,000 or more messages to Gmail accounts in 24 hours |
| Every sender | SPF or DKIM, TLS, valid forward and reverse DNS |
| Bulk senders also | SPF and DKIM, DMARC, one-click unsubscribe on marketing mail |
Updated
If you send a newsletter, receipts or booking reminders from your own domain, Postmaster Tools is the one place Gmail tells you directly whether people mark your mail as spam and whether your setup meets its rules. It costs nothing and takes about ten minutes to connect. The checker below turns your own numbers into the same traffic-light reading.
Estimated spam rate: 0.075%
Under 0.1%: inside Google's recommended range.
Your own estimate from your own numbers. Postmaster Tools shows Google's measured figure, which can differ.
Postmaster Tools (v2) lists these dashboards. Here is what each one tells a small sender in plain words.
| Dashboard | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Compliance status | Whether you meet Gmail's sender requirements, item by item |
| Spam Rate | The share of your mail Gmail users reported as spam |
| IP Reputation | Bad, Low, Medium or High for the IP addresses that send your mail |
| Domain Reputation | Bad, Low, Medium or High for your sending domain |
| Feedback Loop | Spam rate for campaigns that carry a feedback loop ID |
| Authentication | How much of your mail passed SPF, DKIM and DMARC |
| Encryption | How much of your mail arrived over TLS |
| Delivery Errors | Share of authenticated mail rejected or temporarily failed, with reasons |
Google gives you the exact value to paste. It looks like this TXT record; yours will have a different token.
Host is usually @ for the root domain. Copy the value from Postmaster Tools, not from this page.
Type: TXT
Host: @
Value: THE-EXACT-VALUE-POSTMASTER-TOOLS-SHOWS
TTL: 3600The spam rate counts messages that reached the inbox and were then marked as spam by hand; mail Gmail filtered to spam itself is left out. One report in a thousand emails is 0.1%, so a small list can cross the line with only a handful of clicks.
When the rate rises, look at what changed that week: a new list import, a promotion sent to old contacts, or a missing unsubscribe link are the usual causes.
This view lists the sender requirements and marks each as passing or needing work, so it doubles as a checklist for SPF, DKIM, DMARC, encryption and unsubscribe headers.
Google opened it to every sender that mails personal Gmail accounts, not only bulk senders, which makes it useful even for a small shop.
Yes. Anyone with a Google Account can sign in, add a domain and see its dashboards once the domain is verified. There is no paid tier.
Either the domain is not verified yet, or you send too little mail to Gmail users. Google notes that dashboards might leave out data on days with low outgoing volume, to protect user privacy.
Google's sender guidelines ask you to keep the user-reported spam rate below 0.1% and to stop it ever reaching 0.3%. Above that line Google says you are not eligible for its mitigation support.
It is still worth adding, because the Compliance status view checks your authentication and unsubscribe setup for any sender to personal Gmail accounts. Charts based on volume may stay thin until you send more.
Google asks for the domain you use to authenticate outgoing mail with SPF, DKIM or both. For most small businesses that is the domain in the From address once custom DKIM is switched on in the email service.
Related: SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained, One-click unsubscribe headers, Hard bounce vs soft bounce, Email header analyzer, Email marketing best practices.
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