Google Postmaster retired domain reputation: what to use

Gmail's Postmaster Tools used to answer the question directly: High, Medium, Low or Bad. One glance told you how Gmail saw your domain, and during a warm-up watching that label climb was the proof the ramp was working.

That chart is gone. Senders were redirected to v2 from 30 September 2025 and the v1 dashboard was fully retired by the end of that year. Domain and IP reputation dashboards are not coming back.

Why Google removed it

Two reasons, both reasonable from Google's side. The four buckets were routinely misread — senders treated "Medium" as a grade to optimise rather than a coarse summary, and read movement between buckets as precise feedback it was never designed to give. And the labels lagged: a static bucket updated against weeks of history tells you where you were, not what Gmail is doing with today's send.

What matters is that Google removed the visible label, not the underlying reputation. Gmail still scores your domain and still filters on it. The instrument was taken away; the thing it measured is unchanged.

What Postmaster Tools v2 still gives you

More than most people realise:

• Spam complaint rate — still the most important number Google shows you, and still the one that moves filtering fastest. Keep it under 0.10%; Google's stated ceiling is 0.30% and that is already a crisis level.
• Authentication results — SPF, DKIM and DMARC pass rates across your actual Gmail traffic. This catches a broken selector or an unaligned From domain faster than any external checker, because it reports on real mail.
• Delivery errors — the category where reputation-driven rejections still surface. The error text is less direct than a reputation label but more actionable: it names what happened to specific mail.
• Compliance status — whether you meet Google's bulk sender requirements, with Deliverability analysis added to that page in June 2026. It is the closest surviving thing to the old chart: a qualitative read on how your mail is performing rather than a bucket.
• Feedback loop data — if you have FBL set up for your campaign identifiers.

Rebuilding the signal you lost

No single source replaces the chart. The practical substitute is three cheap inputs read together:

1. Gmail spam rate from v2, watched as a trend rather than a daily number. A step change is the alarm; the absolute value matters less than the direction.
2. A blocklist sweep across the lists receivers actually consult — Spamhaus, Barracuda, Cisco Talos, SORBS — on your sending domains and IPs. A listing explains a sudden drop that nothing in your own behaviour accounts for.
3. Seed-inbox placement testing across Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Yahoo. This is the one that genuinely replaces the chart, because it measures the outcome the chart was a proxy for: did the mail reach the inbox, and at which provider did it stop doing so.

One caveat on the Gmail side specifically: Promotions carries the INBOX label, so a message filed in Promotions looks like inbox placement to any tool reading labels alone. If your placement number does not distinguish tabs, it is optimistic.

A third-party reputation score — Validity's Sender Score or similar — is a reasonable fourth input, with the same caveat the old chart had: it is one vendor's model, benchmarked against their panel, not Gmail's opinion.

What this changed about warming up

The practical loss is sharpest during a ramp. You used to be able to point at a label climbing from Low to High and call the warm-up done. Now the evidence has to be assembled: spam rate flat and low, authentication passing at 100%, no blocklist entries, and placement holding above your threshold at each provider as volume increases.

That is more work, and it is also a better instrument. A placement curve per provider tells you *where* you are failing, which the old single label never did — a domain reading "High" on Gmail could be going to spam at Microsoft 365 all along, and plenty were.

MailPilot tracks exactly that set: daily per-mailbox reputation, per-provider placement, authentication state and blocklist status, with the history kept so a change has a date attached. That is the shape the answer has to take now that Gmail no longer hands you a label.