Use Postmaster Tools to monitor information about outgoing email that you send to personal Gmail accounts, and about the domains and IP addresses you use to send email. The information in Postmaster Tools helps you meet Gmail’s requirements for sending email to personal Gmail accounts, described in our Email sender guidelines and Email sender guidelines FAQ.
Postmaster Tools dashboards have detailed information about spam rate, reputation, message authentication, and delivery errors. For details about each dashboard, visit Postmaster Tools dashboards.
To use Postmaster Tools, you must have a Google Account or a Google Workspace account. Data in Postmaster Tools only applies to messages sent to personal Gmail accounts. A personal Gmail account is an account that ends in @gmail.com or @googlemail.com.
Set up Postmaster Tools
Follow these steps to set up Postmaster Tools for your domains. Keep in mind:
- To see dashboards for subdomains independently from the primary domain, add the subdomains to Postmaster Tools in the same way you add a primary domain. We recommend you add subdomains after adding and verifying the primary domain. If the primary domain is verified, you don’t need to verify its subdomains.
- To set up Postmaster Tools access for multiple accounts for a domain, set up separate DNS verification records for each account.
Step 1: Add your sending domain to Postmaster Tools
Important: Add either the DKIM (d=) domain or the SPF (Return-Path) domain. If the DKIM and SPF domains are the same, Postmaster Tools will use messages signed by SPF, DKIM, or both, for dashboard data.
- On your computer, sign in to Postmaster Tools.
- On the "Manage Domains" page, at the top right, click Add new domain.
- On the "Add a new domain" page, enter the domain you use to authenticate outgoing email with SPF, or DKIM, or both.
- Click Create.
- To find the domain, at the top left, click Back.
Step 2: Verify your sending domains
Important:
- You can skip this step and continue setup without verifying your domain, but Postmaster Tools won’t display information about your email until your domain is verified. To skip this step, click Not now.
- You’ll log into your domain provider’s management console in this step, so you may want to open it in another browser tab. Learn how to verify your domain with Google Workspace.
- On your computer, sign in to Postmaster Tools.
- On the "Manage Domains" page, to the right of the domain name, click More options
.
- Click Verify domain.
- In the "Verify ownership of domain" window, copy the TXT or CNAME records.
- Log into your domain provider and add the copied text to your domain's DNS records.
- Return to the "Verify ownership of domain" window and click Verify.
Tip: Typically, Postmaster Tools verifies domains right away, but it can take up to 10 minutes before your domain’s verification status is updated
Step 3: Give others access to your Postmaster Tools dashboards (optional)
To let other people access Postmaster Tools dashboards for your domains, add them to the domain in Postmaster Tools. You can add users to verified domains only, and they must have a Google or Google Workspace account.
- On your computer, sign in to Postmaster Tools.
- On the "Manage Domains" page, to the right of the domain name, click More options
- Click Manage users.
- At the top right, click New user. In the "Add user" window, enter the Google email address of the person you are adding to the domain, then click Add.
When you give people access to your domain, make sure to let them know, as Postmaster Tools does not automatically notify them. When they log in to Postmaster Tools, they’ll see the domains they have access to on the Manage Domains page.
People who don't have domain access get this message when they try to open a dashboard: “You are not authorized to access data for this domain. Please ensure you have verified yourself as an owner, or an owner has granted you read access."
Now you're ready to monitor your outgoing email with the Postmaster Tools dashboards.
Troubleshoot Postmaster Tools setup
Here are recommended actions for issues that might occur during Postmaster Tools setup.
| Issue | Possible causes | Recommended actions |
|---|---|---|
| I can’t verify a domain. |
Postmaster Tools couldn’t connect to the DNS server for the domain. The verification DNS CNAME record was not found for your domain. |
Wait a few minutes to let Google get your changes to the CNAME records. Check that the domain verification string is correct in the DNS records for the domain. Try to verify the domain again, with a new string. |
| I can’t give people access to my domain. | The person doesn’t have a Google account. | Make sure the person you’re trying to add has a Google account and you’re using the email address associated with that account. |
| I don’t see the expected data for my domain in one or more dashboards. | Data might be missing if the total number of messages for a given day is too low. This is to protect users' privacy. |
Check the dashboards again when your email sending volume increases enough to populate the dashboards. Follow these best practices for sending email:
|