Your ESP tells you your emails got delivered. But Gmail? Gmail never sends you a note saying "hey, we don't trust you." Except there's one place it kind of does. It's free, it's from Google, and if a big slice of your list is on Gmail, you should probably be looking at it.

Google Postmaster Tools is a free dashboard that shows you how Gmail views your sending domain. Not what your sending platform reports. What Google itself sees on its side of the conversation. It's a read-only window, it won't fix anything for you, but it tells you the truth about where you stand with Gmail.

Inside, Gmail charts a handful of signals it uses to decide whether you land or get filtered. Domain reputation. IP reputation. Your spam complaint rate. And your authentication results, whether your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks are passing. Each one gets plotted over time, so when something shifts you can actually see the day it happened.

Reputation gets a rating, and it's blunt: High, Medium, Low, or Bad. High is where you want to live. A Low or Bad domain reputation is a red flag that a real chunk of your Gmail mail is getting routed to spam. Domain reputation is the one to watch most, it's the strongest signal in the whole dashboard.

If Gmail's scoring system is new to you, stick around, we're doing every one of these reporting tools one at a time. Subscribe and you'll get the whole set.

The most actionable metric is spam rate, the share of your mail that Gmail users marked as spam by hand. Google wants you under zero point one zero percent. Climb past zero point three zero percent and you'll start feeling real delivery pain. So that's the number to keep your eye on, not because one complaint sinks you, but because a rising trend is Gmail telling you something's off.

Two things to know before you get excited. First, you need volume. Google only fills the charts once you're sending enough to Gmail, so a small sender might set it up and stare at empty graphs. That's normal. Second, this is Gmail only. It tells you nothing about Outlook, Yahoo, or anyone else. Think of it as your Gmail-specific report card, not the whole grade.

Setup's quick. Go to postmaster.google.com, sign in with any Google account, add your sending domain, and prove it's yours by dropping a DNS TXT record Google hands you. Once that's verified and you're sending, the charts start filling in.

So Postmaster Tools is one of the few places Gmail tells you, to your face, what it thinks of your mail. Domain reputation for the big picture, spam rate for the number to protect. You can't improve what you can't see, and this is you finally getting to see it.

Next up: once you're in, what exactly does every one of those charts mean? We break down each metric. And subscribe, we're answering every email question, one at a time.

What are Google Postmaster Tools? It's a free dashboard from Google that shows how Gmail views your sending domain, not what your ESP claims. In about three minutes: the signals it tracks (domain reputation, IP reputation, spam rate, authentication results), how reputation is rated High to Bad, the spam-rate threshold to protect (under 0.10%), and the two catches (you need volume, and it only covers Gmail).

0:00 What does Gmail think of you?

0:20 The one-line answer

0:45 The signals it tracks

1:15 How reputation is scored

1:50 The number that moves: spam rate

2:20 Two catches: volume and Gmail-only

2:45 Setting it up (DNS TXT)

Concepts in this video: domain reputation, IP reputation, spam complaint rate, authentication (SPF/DKIM/DMARC), DNS TXT record.

Related: What info you get from Postmaster Tools → [004.007.002]. How to set it up → [004.007.003].

Check your authentication first with our free SPF checker → reviewmyemails.com/tools/spf-checker

Full written guide → reviewmyemails.com/emailalmanac/monitoring-and-reporting/postmaster-tools-and-snds/what-are-google-postmaster-tools

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