The email marketer’s guide to Google Postmaster’s new compliance page

In the realm of email marketing, understanding your deliverability is key to your success. No matter how great your content or how irresistible your offers are, if your emails don’t reach the intended recipients’ inboxes, your efforts are in vain. That’s why any tool or feature aimed at improving and/or simplifying email deliverability is welcomed.

Enter the new Google Postmaster compliance page — a helpful addition to Google Postmaster Tools that simplifies how you obtain your compliance data in all the important areas. 

What is Google Postmaster?

Before we delve into the latest update, let’s quickly recap what Google Postmaster is all about. Google Postmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google that offers insights into a sender’s email performance within Gmail. It provides data on delivery errors, spam reports, sender reputation, and more, allowing senders to identify and address issues that may be affecting their email deliverability.

The importance of compliance

Compliance with email industry standards and best practices is crucial for maintaining a good sender reputation and ensuring inbox placement. Failure to comply with these standards can result in emails being filtered as spam or even blocked outright by email providers like Gmail.

The new compliance page

The new Google Postmaster compliance page is designed to help senders better understand and adhere to Gmail’s sending guidelines and policies. It provides a comprehensive overview of a sender’s compliance status, highlighting key issues that could impact deliverability.

Features and benefits

1. SPF and DKIM authentication
Ensure that your emails are properly authenticated using SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), reducing the likelihood of them being flagged as spam or phishing attempts.

2. From header alignment
Verify that the “From” header in your emails aligns with the DKIM signature, enhancing trust and improving inbox placement.

3. DMARC authentication
Verifies that your DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) record is present and correct.

4. Encryption
Pass/fail result letting you know whether your emails are encrypted in transit, safeguarding sensitive information and enhancing security.

5. User reported spam rate
Lets you know if your user reported spam rate is below the acceptable threshold.

6. DNS Records
Verifies your domain’s DNS A and PTR records.

7. One-click unsubscribe
Coming soon – there are no published details on this but we assume this will be a pass/fail if your email header has a RFC 8058 compliant one-click unsubscribe or not.

8. Honor unsubscribe
Coming soon – again there are no published details but we would hazard a guess that this will monitor whether or not senders continue to email recipients after they have requested unsubscription.

How to access the compliance page

Accessing the compliance page is simple for senders who are already using Google Postmaster Tools. Look for the text link at the top of your Postmaster tools homepage: