Set up your PMT account
What domain can I add to Postmaster Tools?You can either add the DKIM (d=) domain or the SPF (Return-Path) domain.
If your DKIM and SPF domains are the same, Postmaster Tools will combine traffic that’s signed by either SPF or DKIM (or both) when it generates the dashboards. Some dashboards, such as the spam rate dashboard and feedback loop dashboard, only show data if the emails are signed by DKIM authentication.
Yes. However, the dashboards for that domain will be empty until you verify the domain and prove ownership.
Once your domain has been verified and you’re sending data, you can use the dashboards.
To verify your domain, add the TXT verification record to your domain's DNS verification.
When you sign up, you get a verification record that you copy and paste into your domain settings (usually stored with your domain host). Learn more about how to verify ownership of your Google domain or verify your domain from a different host.
Important: You can only add people to your domain who have a valid Google or Google Workspace Account.
- Sign in to Postmaster Tools.
- Point to the verified domain you want to add someone to.
- On the right, click More
Manage users.
- In the bottom right, click 'Add'.
- In the pop-up window, enter the Google Account email address of the person who you want to access your domain's Postmaster Tools data.
Manage users.To view data for all traffic to your domain, including the traffic on your subdomains, add the domain name. This data also includes any traffic corresponding to the exact domain-name match.
For example, example.com authenticates emails with two other subdomains, a.example.com and b.example.com. To view the data for traffic authenticated by 'a.example.com', 'b.example.com' and 'example.com', add the main domain.
Once you've added and verified ownership of a domain name, you can add subdomains to that domain and view data without having to verify each of them. To view separate data for only your sub-domains, add your sub-domains independently.
Understand your data
Why do I only see recent data?If you see '0.0%' as a value, either the number is low enough to be almost negligible and has been rounded down to zero, or the volume of emails sent is too low. The value is included so that you can view the triggering reason in the table below the graph.
To understand the triggering reasons, check the Postmaster Tools article.
Your sending reputation is how Gmail's spam filter identifies if your email could be spam or not. If your reputation is higher, you’re identified as less likely to send spam and you’ll have better delivery rates.
Email deliverability is based on a lot of factors, including sender authentication, sending only to subscribed users who want your content, following good unsubscribe practices, and much more.
The definitions of spam below includes emails detected as spam by Gmail’s spam filter, and emails reported by users as spam.
- Bad: a history of sending an extremely high volume of spam. Emails coming from this entity will almost always be rejected at SMTP or marked as spam.
- Low: known to send a considerable volume of spam regularly, and emails from this sender will likely be marked as spam.
- Medium/Fair: known to send good-quality emails, but has occasionally sent a low volume of spam. Most of the emails from this entity will have a fair deliverability rate, except when there is a notable increase in spam levels.
High: has a good track record of a very low spam rate, and complies with Gmail's sender guidelines. Emails will rarely be marked by the spam filter.
Data exceptions
Sometimes, I don’t see all my sending IPs in the IP reputation dashboard tables. Why?Most of the Postmaster Tools dashboards will only display data when there’s a sizable daily volume of email traffic (up to the order of hundreds) coming from your authentication domains and/or certain other conditions, in place to prevent abuse.
You may see a 'No data to display' error message on the IP and Domain reputation dashboards. This may happen when your reputation is too low to show a value. Learn how to improve your email delivery rate.
To show data, some of the dashboards, such as Spam Rate and Feedback Loop, need your emails to be authenticated by DKIM.
Miscellaneous
How do I increase my email delivery rate? How do I prevent emails from being blocked or sent to spam? What time zone does Postmaster Tools use?You can use common accessibility options with Postmaster Tools, including screen readers and keyboard navigation.
Screen readers and browsers that you can use
- Windows: NVDA with FireFox
- Mac: VoiceOver with Chrome
- Chromebooks: ChromeVox with Chrome