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Email activity

Google Postmaster Tools

Register your domain with Google and see, in Gmail's own numbers, how your mail is being received.

What this is

Google Postmaster Tools is a free page where Gmail tells you what it thinks of your domain: how much of your mail Gmail users mark as spam, and whether your domain has a good, low or bad reputation with Gmail. It is the only place that information exists, and Google only shows it to the domain's owner — so we cannot register your domain for you, and this page walks you through doing it yourself. It takes about ten minutes plus one DNS record.

You do not need it to send mail. You need it the day Gmail starts filing your mail as spam and you want to know why.

How it works

Every day Gmail counts the mail it received from your domain, how much of it its users reported as spam, and whether it passed the SPF, DKIM and DMARC checks. Postmaster Tools shows you those counts as a graph, per day, for the last few months.

Two things decide whether you see anything:

  • Ownership. You prove you own the domain by adding a TXT record to your DNS, exactly as you did for SPF and DKIM. Google checks the record and unlocks the page.
  • Volume. Gmail only shows numbers for a domain that sends it enough mail to be meaningful — roughly a few hundred messages a day to Gmail addresses. Below that the page stays empty, and that is normal, not a fault.

The number to watch is the spam rate. Google's own line is 0.3%: a domain above it for long starts landing in the spam folder, and above it for weeks may be blocked outright. Mailyte's Deliverability page shows you bounces and complaints from what we can see; Postmaster shows you what Gmail sees, which is the view that decides where your mail goes.

Set it up

  1. Open postmaster.google.com and sign in with any Google account. A personal Gmail address is fine; it only needs to be one you will keep access to.
  2. Press the + button and type your sending domain — example.com, the domain your mail comes from, not mail.example.com.
  3. Google shows you a TXT record: a name (usually your bare domain, @ at most DNS hosts) and a value that starts with google-site-verification=. Copy it.
  4. Add that TXT record at your DNS host — the same place your Mailyte records live. If you are not sure where that is, DNS without the jargon explains how to find it. Adding a record does not touch your existing SPF, DKIM or MX records.
  5. Back in Postmaster Tools, press Verify. If it fails, wait ten minutes and try again — DNS changes take time to be seen.
  6. Wait for volume. The graphs fill in once your domain has sent enough mail to Gmail for a few days. Until then the page says there is no data, and there is nothing to fix.

Where to look once it fills in: Spam rate first, then Domain reputation. Green is fine. Anything else, read Why mail lands in spam and check your bounce and complaint numbers under Deliverability.

When something is wrong

Verification keeps failing. Check the record's name. Some DNS hosts want @, some want the bare domain, and some add the domain themselves — so typing example.com produces example.com.example.com, which Google will never find. The same mistake catches people adding SPF; the fix is the same.

It verified, but every graph says "no data". Your domain is not yet sending enough mail to Gmail addresses for Google to publish numbers. This is the most common state for a new domain, and it means nothing about your reputation.

The spam rate is high. Two causes cover nearly every case. Either people are receiving mail they did not ask for — check that your list is people who signed up, and that every campaign carries a working unsubscribe link — or the domain's authentication is incomplete, which makes legitimate mail look forged. Setting up your domain covers the second; the first is a question about the list.

You verified the wrong domain. Postmaster Tools is per domain, and a subdomain is a separate domain. If your mail comes from news.example.com, register that too.