Google Postmaster Tools v2: what changed after v1 retired

If you are looking for your domain reputation grade in Google Postmaster Tools, stop: it is gone. Postmaster Tools v1 was retired — senders were redirected to v2 from 30 September 2025, and v1 was gone by the end of 2025 — and the domain and IP reputation dashboards are permanently gone with it. Any tool or article still showing you a Bad/Low/Medium/High reputation for your domain is estimating it, not reading it from Google.

Here is what actually remains, and how to run monitoring without the grade.

What v2 reports

Set it up by verifying the domain with a DNS TXT record. Data starts from verification — there is no backfill — and only appears on days with enough volume for Google to report without exposing individual users.

Spam rate is now the primary number

With the reputation grade gone, spam rate is the closest thing to a single health metric Google hands you. Google's stated threshold for bulk senders is 0.30%. Treat 0.10% as your working ceiling, because by the time you are at 0.3% the damage has already been happening for days.

Two properties of the metric matter operationally:

• It is a ratio over inboxed mail. Raising volume to dilute a spike does not work, and a climbing curve is itself a negative signal.
• It is per domain. One careless segment contaminates everything sent from that domain, which is the argument for sending cold outreach from a subdomain rather than your root.

When a spike appears, the question is which send caused it. Match the date against your send log, isolate the segment, and suppress rather than reshape.

Compliance status replaces guesswork about requirements

The requirements it checks are concrete: SPF and DKIM passing with DMARC published and aligned to the visible From domain; valid forward-confirmed reverse DNS on sending IPs; TLS on the connection; one-click unsubscribe (List-Unsubscribe plus List-Unsubscribe-Post) on bulk commercial mail, honoured promptly. A p=none DMARC policy satisfies the DMARC requirement.

If compliance status says you are failing, stop optimising anything else. These are pass/fail gates that produce rejections, not placement nudges.

What v2 still cannot tell you

• Where your mail landed. There is no inbox-versus-spam report and no tab breakdown. Postmaster Tools reports what Google thinks of your traffic, not where it was filed.
• Which tab. This matters more than people expect, because Gmail's Promotions tab still carries the `INBOX` label — so any label-based placement check you build elsewhere counts a Promotions delivery as an inbox hit and overstates primary-tab delivery.
• Per-recipient detail. Unlike Microsoft's JMRP, which forwards the actual junk-reported message, Google gives you a rate with no addresses.
• Anything about other providers. Microsoft's SNDS and JMRP are the Outlook-side equivalents; Yahoo and AOL run one shared filtering stack and are measured separately again.

A monitoring set that works now

1. Spam rate daily, with an alert at 0.10% rather than 0.30%.
2. Compliance status, treated as a binary.
3. Authentication pass rates, watched for partial failures that reveal a forgotten sending path.
4. Delivery errors, read with the 4xx/5xx distinction intact.
5. Seed-based placement tests on a cadence, with Gmail tabs reported separately — this is the part Postmaster Tools cannot supply.
6. SNDS and JMRP registration for your Microsoft traffic, done before you need it, because neither backfills.

What not to do

• Do not look for the reputation grade. It was retired, it is not returning, and inferred versions are guesses.
• Do not treat a flat spam rate as proof of inbox placement. You can have an excellent spam rate and sit in Promotions.
• Do not add volume to dilute a spam-rate spike.
• Do not verify the domain and then never check it. There is no history before verification, so the archive you will want during an incident is the one you started months ago.
• Do not assume a Google-side fix helps elsewhere. The requirements overlap across providers; the filtering does not.

How MailPilot helps

MailPilot covers the half Postmaster Tools stopped reporting: per-mailbox reputation tracked daily, and inbox placement measured per provider with a seed-inbox network that reports Gmail's tabs separately rather than trusting labels. It also checks SPF, DKIM and DMARC alignment on the domains your connected mailboxes send from, which is the same ground compliance status covers — before a campaign discovers it the hard way.