Happy “No Gmail Reputation Day” to all who celebrate! Like many email geeks, we have mixed feelings. But we ultimately know that by monitoring a wide variety of inbox signals and following best practices, most in our circle will be just fine–even trading up eventually.
To us, “chasing the colors” of Reputation tiers was a reward for putting in the work on paying attention to subscriber behavior and implementing better sending practices. For the most part, inbox placement rates vs. spam folder placement have consistently been closely aligned in our seeded inbox tests across clients.
So It Goes…
But let us back up for those who missed Google’s big announcement: As of September 30th, “you will no longer be able to access the old Postmaster Tools web interface (v1). The updated Postmaster Tools API will return data consistent with the v2 dashboards.”
Google goes on to report that a new v2 API will launch before the end of 2025 to replace the current API, stating, “We will be introducing new dashboards to provide senders with even more useful and actionable information.”
As email experts like Al Iverson succinctly stated, this update means that domain and IP reputation data (including the bad, low, medium, and high rankings in corresponding colors) are now retired and no longer available.
Gmail is telling us to pay more attention to complaint rates, which is a strong signal of sender reputation. That said, there have been so many times that this is counterintuitive since Gmail only reports complaints on emails that land in the inbox.
It can be challenging to explain to a sender that a low / 0% complaint rate (CR) in Google Postmaster Tools is not always a positive sign: If their reputation was reported as bad/low, we could go on the assumption that the CR was low because emails were going into the spam folder.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
“A drop in domain reputation was always a strong signal that an aspect of a sender's program needed attention.” ~ Thom Porter, Sr. Deliverability Consultant at Inbox Monster
We have always relied on reputation data as a backup to get a more holistic picture of how Gmail viewed a sender instead of relying on complaint rates only.
Based on Google’s recent updates, Gmail’s v2 compliance dashboard considers authentication to be significantly more important than reputation now. We don’t necessarily agree with this—a sender can have all the required authentication in place and still have practices that don’t align with positive subscriber engagement, and still incur potentially high complaints.
Also, after reviewing a lot of feedback from peers in the deliverability space, the consensus seems to be that reputation charts were very helpful in communication with senders.
We’re finding valuable ways to use the v2 dashboard, such as the feedback loop complaint rates and finding patterns in what emails are causing spikes (recent examples: political-leaning subject lines from non-political senders, and higher complaint rates on the second email of the day from the same sender).
Our main take? We’re hoping Gmail replaces its reputation data with some other source of deliverability euphoria, because there is no better work-related feeling than helping to improve a client’s reputation over time.
It felt GREAT on September 1st to have a call with this sender:
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According to its announcement, Google has insinuated that new data is in the works to share. So, ultimately, if Gmail is saying that reputation data is no longer useful or accurate, we guess we should listen!
The reality is, with the use of inbox placement testing and a variety of other signals we rely on today (both positive and negative), we already have a very strong sense of whether a sender is doing the right things or the wrong things to reach the subscribers’ inbox—with or without Google reputation data. New data, once available, will bring added transparency to senders’ relationship with subscribers.
We work day in and day out with senders to evaluate what works, and also doesn’t work, to reach the inbox at Google. All those experiences will continue to ring true.
Inbox Monster’s End Game
“This shift isn’t just a UI update—Postmaster Tools v2 will give senders more reliable data and modern APIs to guide smarter deliverability strategies. Think of it as trading in a flip phone for a smartphone—Postmaster Tools v2 is built for the modern inbox.” ~ Josie Garcia, Deliverability Principal at Inbox Monster
So what’s next? Even though Inbox Monster will no longer report on Google domain and IP reputation as of Google’s September 30th update, your Reputation tab in our platform will continue summarizing all other reputation data from providers (e.g., Microsoft, Spamhaus), including Google’s user-reported spam complaint data and delivery error data.
By the end of 2025, Google is expected to go live with a new API version of Postmaster Tools (v2), in which a variety of new deliverability and compliance signals will be made available to inform senders on their email deliverability and health.
While we await new API data from Google, Gmail and Google Workspace deliverability can continue to be assessed through your seed data for inbox placement rates and in conjunction with spam complaint, blocklist, spam trap and Google delivery error data found in our Reputation tab of the platform.
Our team is assessing what changes to make on our Reputation tab to adjust the user interface in light of Google’s API changes. More to come from us on this in the near future. As new API feeds become available with Google, we’ll be making additional data points available within our platform for your benefit as well.
For any questions about Google’s API changes, please don’t hesitate to seek our expert services by reaching us within our Help Center, at support@inboxmonster.com, or through your support team.
As always, when it comes to deliverability solutions, we’re by your side every step of the way.
