Google Postmaster Tools v2 is the version every Gmail sender now lands in, the v1 API is retired, and the shutdown of the old web interface has been postponed with no new date. Two dashboards are not making the trip: Domain Reputation and IP Reputation are the only ones Google has said will be retired, and they are still live while it builds their replacement. Everything else carried over, and v2 added a Compliance status dashboard that answers the question the reputation dial never did, which is what to fix.
Postmaster Tools is free, it covers mail sent to personal Gmail accounts only, and it is the only first-party view Google gives senders. It also has one structural blind spot that this guide gets to in full: the spam rate it reports can fall while your mail gets worse, and Google documents why.
Google postponed the shutdown and retired the v1 API anyway
The old Postmaster Tools web interface is still running because Google changed its mind about the timing. Its deprecation page says the legacy interface deprecation is postponed after sender feedback, that all senders should still move to v2, and that v1 will eventually be retired. No date is published. Senders need to do nothing: Google redirects to v2 on its own.
The v1 API is a different story and it is already over. Google states that now the v2 API has launched, the v1 API will be retired and developers must migrate. The v2 API covers everything v1 did apart from Domain and IP reputation, and it adds compliance status, domain management and batch endpoints.
Google gives three reasons for retiring the reputation dashboards, and they are worth reading as a statement about what the company thinks senders should be looking at. Reputation data is not easily actionable for most senders. Changes in sender behaviour are slow to show up in it. And the dashboard can mislead, because reputation is one of many factors that decide deliverability. A more intuitive replacement is promised without a date.
The eight dashboards and which two are leaving
Postmaster Tools v2 has eight dashboards. Six are permanent, two are on notice.
| Dashboard | What it measures | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Compliance status | Your compliance with each sender requirement, row by row | Added in v2 |
| Spam rate | Percent of your messages recipients manually marked as spam | Staying |
| Feedback loop | Spam rate per campaign, for messages carrying a feedback loop ID | Staying |
| Authentication | Percent of your mail passing SPF, DKIM and DMARC | Staying |
| Encryption | Percent of your mail sent over an encrypted SSL or TLS connection | Staying |
| Delivery errors | Percent of authenticated messages rejected or temporarily failed | Staying |
| Domain Reputation | Quality rating for the domains you send from | To be retired |
| IP Reputation | Quality rating for the IP addresses you send from | To be retired |
Four facts about the data apply to every one of them. It is not real time, and typically updates within 24 hours or longer. Some dashboards only count messages authenticated with DKIM. Days with low outgoing volume may be withheld to protect Gmail users' privacy, so a quiet week can look like an outage. And every timestamp is UTC. Time ranges are fixed at 7, 30, 60, 90 or 120 days.
While they last, the two reputation dashboards rate a domain or IP as Bad, Low, Medium or High. High means a history of very low spam rates and compliance with Gmail's sender guidelines. Bad means a history of sending a high volume of spam regularly, and mail that is almost always marked as spam or rejected outright.
Compliance status is the dashboard v2 added, and it is the one to read first
The Compliance status dashboard scores your domain against each Gmail sender requirement separately, so it tells you which rule you are failing rather than how Google feels about you overall. It is available to every sender, not only bulk senders, and Google defines a bulk sender as any sender pushing about 5,000 messages or more to Gmail accounts in a 24 hour period.
Five requirements apply to everyone: SPF and DKIM authentication, DNS records, message formatting, encryption, and user-reported spam rate. Three more apply to bulk senders only: DMARC authentication, one-click unsubscribe, and honouring unsubscribe requests. Our guide to the Gmail and Yahoo sender requirements covers the thresholds behind each one.
Every row reads Compliant, Needs work, or No data found. Two behaviours of this dashboard cause most of the confusion around it:
- Changes take up to seven days to appear. The dashboard uses a rolling multi-day average, so fixing DNS this morning does not clear a row this afternoon. Google's own advice is to wait seven days before checking again.
- It reports primary domains only. Data from subdomains feeds the primary domain's verdict, and the verdict is published for the primary domain alone. If you separate streams by subdomain, as our guide to subdomains versus root domains recommends, the compliance view merges them again and the other dashboards are where per-subdomain data lives.
No data found carries a detail worth knowing before you go hunting for a broken record. For configuration requirements such as DNS, the status reflects the settings Google observed when it received those messages, not what your DNS says right now.
One-click unsubscribe is the requirement most senders fail, and it is failed more widely than any other check we measure. In our own data, 14% of the senders we test pass the one-click List-Unsubscribe check, which is the worst result on our 2026 deliverability benchmark. The List-Unsubscribe header is two headers and a working endpoint, and the API documentation is blunt that the user-facing requirement is one-click unsubscribe while Google actually tests several unsubscribe support rules behind it.
Deliverability analysis names your problem in words
Deliverability analysis is a diagnostic tool inside the Compliance status dashboard, and it gives your domain a plain-language recommendation rather than a rating. It is the closest thing v2 has to a replacement for the reputation dial, and it is more specific than the dial ever was, because each verdict names a cause.
Google triggers a recommendation in six situations, and the v2 API publishes the same set as reason codes on domains.getComplianceStatus:
| What Google tells you | API reason code | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| You send too little email | MESSAGE_VOLUME_LOW | Not enough outgoing mail to judge |
| Your messages fail to deliver | SMTP_ERRORS_HIGH | Many messages returning delivery errors |
| You exceed the spam threshold | SPAM_RATE_HIGH | Spam rate above 0.1% |
| Recipients do not open or interact | USER_FEEDBACK_LOW | Users take no action on your messages |
| Recipients want more of your messages | USER_FEEDBACK_POSITIVE | Users signal they want the mail |
| You do not meet the sender guidelines | SENDER_NOT_COMPLIANT | A compliance row is failing |
The API carries one more code the help documentation does not spell out, USER_FEEDBACK_NEGATIVE, which indicates that users do not want to receive the messages. That verdict is the important one, because it is independent of every compliance row above it. A domain can pass SPF, DKIM, DMARC, alignment, formatting, DNS, encryption and both unsubscribe requirements, and still be told that its recipients do not want its mail. Authentication is the entry fee, not the outcome.
Your Gmail spam rate falls when your deliverability gets worse
The most important thing to understand about Postmaster Tools is that its headline metric is self-limiting, and Google documents the mechanism in its own troubleshooting section.
The spam rate is the percentage of your messages that are delivered to an engaged recipient's inbox and then marked as spam by that recipient. Read the definition slowly. The denominator is mail that reached an inbox. Mail that Gmail filed in spam on arrival is not in it, because nobody in the spam folder is pressing a report button.
So the number moves the wrong way under a real failure. Google lists "a high spam rate suddenly changed to a rate of 0" as a known situation, and gives the cause: a historical high spam rate means many messages are now being sent to spam automatically, and recipients are no longer reporting inbox messages. The same page warns that an extremely low spam rate may mean something is affecting the accuracy of the data, and that if Gmail is filtering a significant share of your mail, the rate will look low simply because fewer messages reach an inbox.
A 0.00% spam rate is therefore two different states wearing the same number. Either your mail is welcome, or it is being filtered so thoroughly that nobody sees it to complain. Postmaster Tools cannot tell you which, and neither can any metric that only counts what happened after delivery.
What Postmaster Tools cannot tell you
Postmaster Tools never reports where your messages landed. There is no inbox rate, no spam folder rate and no tab breakdown in any of the eight dashboards, because Google does not publish placement data to senders. Delivery errors report what was rejected at the door. Everything else reports what people did with mail that got through.
Its scope is narrower than most senders assume in two further ways. It covers personal Gmail accounts only, meaning addresses ending @gmail.com and @googlemail.com, so mail to Google Workspace tenants is outside it entirely. And it covers Gmail alone, so Outlook.com, Yahoo and Apple need their own sources, such as Microsoft SNDS.
Placement is measurable, just not from Postmaster Tools. A seed-list test sends a campaign to accounts held across the major providers and reports where each copy arrived, which is the one measurement that separates a healthy spam rate of zero from a filtered one.
Inbox placement is at 63% across the messages in our benchmark, so the gap between accepted and seen is wide enough to be worth measuring rather than assumed. Inbox placement testing is where that number comes from, and it answers the question the reputation dashboards were only ever a proxy for.
Five Postmaster Tools behaviours that cost senders days
- A blocked unsubscribe request is still your fault. Google counts successful unsubscribe requests toward your compliance rate whether or not your servers receive them. Its documentation names the failure directly: if a service such as Cloudflare blocks those requests before they reach you, you remain responsible for the ones that were never processed.
- Unsubscribes have a 48 hour clock. The honour-unsubscribe row reads Needs work if requests are not actioned within 48 hours, and Google advises giving each mailing list a unique
List-IDorFrom:address so the requests can be attributed. - One-click unsubscribe can fail for messages that have it. If recipients mark many of your messages that lack one-click unsubscribe as spam, the one-click row can read Needs work even where your campaigns carry the headers. The Feedback Loop dashboard is where you find which messages those are.
- Dashboards are allowed to disagree with each other. Compliance status uses a rolling average and slightly different datasets from the other dashboards, so a spam rate that looks fine beside a failing compliance row is expected behaviour rather than a bug.
- Forwarded mail is excluded on a best-effort basis. Google attempts to exclude forwarded messages from dashboard data and says some may still be included, which matters most for senders with large university, alumni or professional-association audiences.
Read compliance status with the API instead of the dashboard
The Postmaster Tools API v2 turns every dashboard row into something a script can check on a schedule, which is the practical answer to a metric that updates on a seven day rolling average. domains.getComplianceStatus returns each requirement with a state of COMPLIANT or NEEDS_WORK plus the reason codes above, and v2 adds domain management and batch endpoints that v1 never had.
The migration is not optional for anyone still on v1, and the schema changed, so existing integrations need code changes rather than a version bump. Reading compliance status daily and alerting on the first NEEDS_WORK is the whole job, and it turns a dashboard nobody remembers to open into a monitor.
What to watch once Domain Reputation goes
Replace one rating with four measurements, because that is what the rating was compressing.
- Compliance status, for the requirement rows. It is the only view that names which rule is failing.
- Spam rate and the Feedback Loop dashboard, read together. The feedback loop attributes complaints to a campaign, which the aggregate rate cannot.
- Delivery errors, for rejections. This is the dashboard that moves first when a provider starts refusing your mail, and Gmail moved to SMTP rejections for non-compliant bulk senders, as covered in our review of what changed in email deliverability in 2026.
- Inbox placement from a seed list, for the thing no Google dashboard reports. It is the only one of the four that survives a 0.00% spam rate produced by filtering.
DMARC aggregate reports belong beside them. They come from every reporting receiver rather than Gmail alone, they show authentication results per source, and they are the one feed that keeps working when a provider retires a dashboard.
What to do in Postmaster Tools this week
- Open Compliance status before anything else. It is the only dashboard that names the rule you are failing, and it now covers every sender rather than bulk senders alone.
- Check the honour-unsubscribe row against your infrastructure, not your code. Confirm that unsubscribe POSTs reach your handler, that no firewall or bot filter is eating them, and that removals complete inside 48 hours.
- Stop reading the spam rate on its own. Pair it with Delivery errors and the Feedback Loop, and treat a sudden drop to zero as a symptom rather than a win.
- Move any v1 API integration now. The v1 API is retired, the v2 schema is different, and
domains.getComplianceStatusis the endpoint that replaces the daily dashboard check. - Add a placement measurement. No Postmaster Tools dashboard reports where your mail landed, which is exactly the fact a falling spam rate hides.
Measure the half Google does not report
Postmaster Tools tells you how Gmail recipients reacted to the mail that reached them. It cannot tell you how much of your mail reached them, and after the reputation dashboards go, it will say even less about why. Run your next campaign through the free Unspam spam test first: it reads SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the exact message, flags the content and formatting issues that turn into complaints, and shows the placement Gmail never publishes, before the campaign is the thing being measured.
