How to use Gmail Postmaster Tools?

Postmaster Tools is the only window Gmail gives you into how it actually treats your mail. Setup is short. Reading it well is the harder part.

Setup, in five minutes

1. Go to postmaster.google.com and sign in with a Google account. A regular Gmail account works.
2. Click "Add Domain" and enter your sending domain (the one in your From address, e.g. yourbrand.com).
3. Google gives you a TXT record to add to your DNS. Copy the full string, log into your DNS host (Cloudflare, Namecheap, your registrar's panel), and add it as a TXT record on the root of your domain. The host field is usually @.
4. Wait 5 to 30 minutes for DNS to propagate, then click "Verify" in Postmaster Tools.
5. That's it. Now wait. Data only appears once Google sees enough volume from your domain. Low-volume senders (under a few thousand messages a day to Gmail) often see "no data available" indefinitely.

The dashboards that matter most

• Domain reputation. High / Medium / Low / Bad. This is the headline. Aim for High. Anything below Medium is filtering you to spam at meaningful volume.
• Spam rate. Stay under 0.1 percent. Gmail's 2024 requirements treat 0.3 percent as a hard ceiling.
• Authentication. Pass rates for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. If any of these aren't near 100 percent, you have a setup problem to fix before anything else.
• Delivery errors. Why Gmail bounced or deferred your mail. Surfaces things like rate limiting, suspicious content, and authentication failures.

What to do when DNS verification stalls

The most common reason: the TXT record was added at the subdomain level instead of root, or with quotes that the DNS host stripped. Use a TXT lookup to confirm the record is live before retrying verification. Review My Emails can check it for you and flag what's actually wrong if you can't see it.