Reputation

Google Postmaster domain reputation: Bad, Low, Medium, and the way back

Google Postmaster Tools is the only place Google shows a sender what it thinks of them: the spam rate, the domain and IP reputation tiers, authentication results and delivery errors for mail to Gmail. This page explains what each tier means in Google's own words, why a dashboard can show nothing, what the connected domains MailStrike sees look like across the tiers, and the steps, in order, that move a domain from Bad or Low back up.

Published Updated 9 min read

What Postmaster Tools is, and how to set it up

A free Google console for domain owners at postmaster.google.com. You add a sending domain, publish the TXT or CNAME record Google gives you to verify it, and from then on Google reports what it records about that domain's mail to Gmail. Team members are added as users per domain. There is an API for reading the same data, which is how sending platforms show Postmaster figures inside their own dashboards.

  1. 1

    Add the domain

    The domain in the From address of the mail you send, and any subdomain that sends separately; each is verified on its own.

  2. 2

    Publish the verification record

    A TXT or CNAME record at the domain. Propagation takes minutes to hours; Postmaster re-checks on demand.

  3. 3

    Wait for volume

    Dashboards fill in for days with enough mail to Gmail. A low-volume domain can be verified and still show nothing.

The dashboards

  • Spam rate: in Google's words, the percent of your messages that recipients manually mark as spam in Gmail. Google also notes the displayed rate can read low when Gmail is already sending a significant number of your messages to spam, because those never reach a person who could report them.
  • Domain reputation: a quality rating for the domains you use to send email, on the four tiers below.
  • IP reputation: the same four tiers for the IP addresses you send from. On Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 the IPs are the provider's; the domain tier is the one that is yours.
  • Authentication, encryption, delivery errors, feedback loop: the share of mail passing SPF, DKIM and DMARC, the share sent over TLS, the rejections and their reasons, and the complaint feedback loop for senders who tag campaigns with a Feedback-ID header.

The four tiers, in Google's words

From Google's Postmaster Tools dashboards page (read 2026-09-06):

  • Bad: a history of sending a high volume of spam; mail from the domain is “almost always marked as spam or rejected”.
  • Low: known to send a significant volume of spam; mail is “likely to be marked as spam”.
  • Medium: known to send legitimate email with occasional spam; a “fair deliverability rate”.
  • High: very low spam rates and compliance with Google's guidelines; mail is “rarely marked as spam”.
The tiers are verdicts on behavior, not on records. A domain with perfect SPF, DKIM and DMARC can sit at Low because of what its recipients did with the mail; a domain with a DKIM problem can sit at High because the mail was wanted. Fixing the records is necessary and, on its own, moves nothing here.

“No data to display at this time”

Google's own note on the dashboards page: “To protect the privacy of Gmail users, the dashboard might not include all data on days when outgoing email volume is low.” That is the usual reason. A cold outreach domain sending a few dozen messages a day to Gmail addresses sees empty charts for weeks; the domain is still scored, you simply cannot see it. The other reasons are an unverified domain (the record has not propagated, or was published at the wrong name) and a domain that sends through a subdomain you have not added separately.

The way back, in order

  1. 1

    Stop the bleeding

    Cut the volume to the addresses that engaged recently and stop every send to a list you cannot vouch for. The tier moves on the rate of complaints and dead addresses, and both are set by what you send today.

  2. 2

    Read the spam rate against Google's lines

    Below 0.10% is the target; 0.30% is the line past which Google will not mitigate until you have been below it for seven consecutive days. If the chart is above it, nothing else on this list matters until it is not.

  3. 3

    Fix authentication and alignment

    SPF and DKIM passing, a DMARC record with the From domain aligned. The authentication dashboard shows the share of mail passing; the auth checker shows why the rest fails.

  4. 4

    Clean the list

    Remove every hard bounce and every address that has not engaged in months. Google reads mail to non-existent addresses as the pattern of a bought list.

  5. 5

    Rebuild the engagement record

    This is the slow part and the one no record fixes: Gmail needs to see the domain's mail opened, replied to and kept, at a volume that climbs rather than jumps. Warming supplies that on a ramp; keep the campaigns small and to engaged recipients while it runs.

  6. 6

    Measure, then scale

    Watch the tier and the spam rate weekly, and run a placement test before increasing volume. The tier lags behavior by days, so a change you made this week shows next week.

The domain reputation checker reads the public half of that list (blacklists, authentication, reverse DNS, domain age) and gives the fix order; recovering sender reputation covers the fifth step in depth, and warming is how it is done.

And for Outlook: SNDS

Microsoft's counterpart is Smart Network Data Services, which reports on the sending IPs you register rather than on domains, plus the Junk Mail Reporting Program, which sends you each complaint an Outlook.com user files. Google's Feedback-ID loop and Microsoft's JMRP answer the same question for their own users. Neither console shows where a given message landed; the Free Deliverability Test does, per provider.

Sources

Every claim above that rests on a third party links to that party's own page. Checked . If something has changed since, tell us and we will correct it.

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