Your Sender Reputation Is Dropping. Here's How to See It First.

Open rates on Gmail slid from 31% to 19% over three weeks. Nothing changed on your side. No new list, no new template, same send time.

You’ve checked SPF, DKIM and DMARC twice and they all pass, and you’ve asked your ESP, who said “everything looks normal from here.”

Both are true and neither is the answer. Gmail keeps a private score for your domain, and something in the last month, a cold segment, a spike in complaints, a list somebody bought, pushed it down.

The next 12 minutes show you what Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo score you on, what drops that score in 48 hours, where to read your current status today (Gmail no longer shows you the score itself), and how to bring it back.

If you’re watching a chart go the wrong way and nobody can tell you why, this is the page for that.

Run a free audit → — paste your email headers and see every failing check, with the fix for each. No account.

What “reputation” means at Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo today

Every mailbox provider keeps a private history of your domain and your sending IPs: how many recipients hit “Report spam,” how many addresses bounced, whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC passed, whether the mail was read, whether the volume looked normal. That history decides whether your next send reaches the inbox, the spam folder, or a rejection at the SMTP door.

None of the three big providers publish the model. What changed is how much of it they let you see, and the direction is the same everywhere: less “here is your score,” more “here are the rules, and here is whether you pass each one.”

• Gmail replaced its reputation dashboards with a Compliance status page in Postmaster Tools V2. Each requirement from the Email sender guidelines is marked Compliant or Needs work. Since November 2025, Gmail says traffic that fails those requirements gets “disruptions, including temporary and permanent rejections” (Google FAQ).
• Outlook.com (hotmail.com, live.com and outlook.com consumer addresses) requires SPF, DKIM and DMARC for domains sending more than 5,000 messages a day. Since May 5, 2025, mail from non-compliant high-volume domains goes to Junk, with rejection under a 550 5.7.515 error to follow on a date Microsoft has not yet announced (Microsoft announcement).
• Yahoo and AOL publish the same shape of rules on the Sender Hub: SPF or DKIM for everyone, a spam rate below 0.3%, valid forward and reverse DNS, and for bulk senders SPF plus DKIM, a DMARC policy of at least p=none, one-click unsubscribe and unsubscribes honored within two days.

So “reputation” now means two things. Inside the filter it is still a score that moves every day. On your side of the glass it is a checklist plus a spam rate. Read both often enough to catch the private score falling before Gmail acts on it.

Gmail’s Compliance status page, check by check

Postmaster Tools V2 lives at postmaster.google.com/v2. The Compliance status dashboard is the first thing you see after you verify a domain. Google documents it on the Postmaster Tools dashboards page, and the V2 API reference lists the same checks by name.

Every requirement gets one of three states:

• Compliant. Your mail to personal Gmail accounts meets the requirement. No action.
• Needs work. The requirement is unmet, and the status column says what to fix. The API calls this state NEEDS_WORK and describes it as non-compliant. This is the “Non-compliant” verdict people mean when they talk about V2.
• No data found. Gmail has not seen enough qualifying mail to judge.

The checks, and the numbers behind them:

Requirement	Who it applies to	What Gmail checks	The line
SPF and DKIM	All senders	Records pass for the sending domain. All senders need at least one; bulk senders need both.	DKIM key of 1024 bits or longer, 2048 recommended
DNS records	All senders	Sending IPs have a PTR record, and that hostname resolves back to the same IP.	Forward and reverse must match
Message formatting	All senders	Messages follow RFC 5322: one From address, a valid Message-ID, single-instance headers appear once.	Any structural failure
Encryption	All senders	Mail arrives over a TLS connection.	Percent of messages over TLS
User-reported spam rate	All senders	Percent of mail delivered to engaged Gmail inboxes that recipients then mark as spam.	Below 0.1%, never 0.3%
DMARC	Bulk senders (about 5,000+ messages a day to Gmail)	A DMARC record exists (p=none is enough) and the From domain aligns with the SPF or DKIM domain. The API splits this into DMARC_POLICY and DMARC_ALIGNMENT.	Policy present, alignment passes
One-click unsubscribe	Bulk senders	Marketing and subscribed mail carries List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click headers (RFC 8058) plus a visible unsubscribe link.	Shows Needs work when mail without the headers is what gets reported as spam
Honor unsubscribe	Bulk senders	Unsubscribe requests are processed.	Within 48 hours

Three details from the same Google page change how you read that table:

1. It is a rolling average, not a live view. Data lands about 24 hours late, and after a fix Google says to allow up to 7 days for a row to flip back to Compliant.
2. It is scored on the primary domain. Add email.example.com and the verdict is for example.com, using traffic from every subdomain.
3. It only covers personal Gmail accounts. Workspace recipients are not counted, and low-volume days are dropped for privacy, so a small sender can sit at “No data found” for weeks.

Under the table sits a newer panel, “Deliverability analysis,” the closest thing V2 has to a verdict on the whole domain. The API lists the reasons it can return: not enough outgoing mail, many delivery errors, sender not compliant, spam rate above 0.1%, and three user-feedback states: negative, low (users take no action) and positive. That last group is Gmail saying, in plain words, that engagement is part of the score even though it never shows you the score.

The spam rate is the number to watch every day

Gmail’s spam rate counts DKIM-signed messages that reached an engaged recipient’s inbox and were then marked as spam. Mail Gmail already filtered to spam is not in the denominator. That creates a trap: if Gmail is quietly filtering half your mail, the rate can look better, because fewer people see the message to report it. Google says so on the dashboards page, and adds that an unusually low rate is itself a warning sign.

The sender guidelines FAQ sets the numbers: keep the rate below 0.1% and never let it reach 0.3%. Rates above 0.1% already cost inbox delivery for bulk senders. Above 0.3%, bulk senders lose eligibility for mitigation until they stay below 0.3% for 7 consecutive days.

Where the Bad, Low, Medium and High bands went

For years the Domain Reputation chart was the Postmaster Tools screen every ESP support team screenshotted. A drop from High to Medium was the early warning. That chart is gone.

Google’s deprecation notice says every V1 dashboard is available in V2 “with the exception of the Domain and IP Reputation dashboards, which will be retired,” because the data was “not easily actionable,” slow to reflect changed behaviour, and “misleading as reputation is only one of many factors.” The V2 API covers everything V1 did “except Domain and IP reputation,” and the V1 API is retired now that V2 is live. Google first set a September 30, 2025 shutdown date for the V1 interface, then postponed it; by August 2026 the old V1 link redirected to the V2 compliance dashboard and V1 API data stopped, as Inbox Monster documented.

What remains in V2: Compliance status, Spam rate, Feedback loop (per-campaign spam rates keyed on your Feedback-ID header), the Authentication dashboard (percent of mail passing SPF, DKIM and DMARC), Encryption (percent over TLS) and Delivery errors (percent of signed mail rejected or temp-failed).

This changes how you watch a domain in three ways:

• There is no leading indicator inside Gmail any more. The old band often dipped before open rates did. Now the earliest Gmail-side signals are a rising spam rate, a rising Delivery errors line, or a row flipping to Needs work, and all three arrive a day late. The engagement drop in your own ESP reports usually shows first.
• A clean checklist is not a clean bill of health. Google’s own troubleshooting page has a section titled “Spam rate is low but reputation is poor.” You can be Compliant on every row and still be filtered because of list quality, content, or a shared IP. The checklist is the floor.
• The domain carries the record, not the IP. Gmail scores compliance per primary domain. Yahoo evaluates senders “at the authenticated domain or From header domain level” (Sender Hub FAQ). Microsoft’s rules apply per sending domain. The IP still matters, since Google says a shared IP’s standing is shared by everyone on it, but the history that follows you from ESP to ESP is the domain’s. A new IP resets nothing at Gmail. A marketing subdomain isolates the spam-rate and delivery-error charts and its DKIM key, but not the parent domain’s compliance verdict.

What still drops your domain fast, and how fast

The filter did not get kinder because the chart went away. These are the events that move the private score in a day or two, in the order I see them in incident logs.

A complaint spike. Gmail calculates the spam rate daily. One send to a cold segment, a re-activation campaign to two-year-old addresses, or a broken suppression list can put a single day above 0.3%. Because the compliance page uses a rolling window, that day drags on the status for a week. A 0.5% day inside a month of 0.05% days is what “sudden filtering with nothing changed” looks like on the Feedback loop chart.

A purchased or scraped list. Spam traps sit on these lists. Gmail does not report trap hits, and Microsoft SNDS dropped trap hit counts from its data report on July 22, 2026 (SNDS announcements). So the first evidence is often a Spamhaus listing or a wave of 550 5.7.1 rejections.

A broken DKIM or SPF record. A DNS migration that drops the DKIM selector, an ESP that rotates keys, or an SPF record past 10 lookups flips the SPF and DKIM row to Needs work and, for bulk senders, breaks DMARC alignment at the same time. Google says such mail “might be marked as spam or rejected with a 5.7.26 error.” Outlook.com sends it to Junk. It is an overnight event, and the V2 Authentication dashboard shows it as a cliff. Our SPF, DKIM and DMARC walkthrough covers the exact records.

A blocklist listing. Spamhaus ZEN and DBL are queried by most receiving systems, and Google tells shared-IP senders to make sure the IP “isn’t on any internet blocklist.” A listing hurts within hours because it acts at the SMTP connection, before any reputation lookup. The free blacklist checker shows current listings; our blocklist removal walkthrough covers delisting.

A volume spike. From Google’s guidelines: “immediately doubling previously sent volumes suddenly could result in rate limiting or reputation drops.” The symptom is 421 4.7.28 temp-fails and a Delivery errors line that jumps the same day.

A compromised account or an unauthorised sender on your domain. Phishing sent through your domain counts against your domain. DMARC aggregate reports are the only place you see this traffic, which is why a p=none policy is worth publishing before you need it.

Recovery is slower than the fall. Gmail says up to 7 days after a fix for the spam rate and compliance status to return within limits. A delisting takes a request and, for Spamhaus, evidence the reason is fixed. Rebuilding engagement takes weeks.

Where to read your status today

No single screen covers all three providers. This is the set I open, in order, when a client’s open rate at one provider drops and nothing else did.

Google Postmaster Tools V2 (postmaster.google.com/v2). Add and verify the DKIM d= domain or the SPF return-path domain, plus each subdomain you want broken out (setup guide). Read Compliance status first, then Spam rate, then Feedback loop, with a Feedback-ID header on every campaign so spikes are attributable. The V2 API exposes domains.getComplianceStatus and domainStats.query if you want the rows in your own dashboards.

Microsoft SNDS (substrate.office.com/ip-domain-management-snds/snds). Per IP, not per domain, and Outlook.com consumer addresses only. You request access to the IPs you control and get daily volume, complaint and filter-result data, plus the Junk Email Reporting Program feedback loop. Microsoft moved SNDS to this portal in 2026 and retired the old sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com URLs. On a shared pool the ESP holds this access; ask them for it.

Yahoo Sender Hub (senders.yahooinc.com). Verify your domain by DNS and enroll it in the Complaint Feedback Loop. It is domain based, works only for DKIM-signed mail, and sends an ARF report per complaint so you can suppress the address.

Sender Score (senderscore.org). Validity’s 0 to 100 score for a sending IP, built from complaint, trap and delivery data shared by providers in the Validity Data Network. On a shared pool you are reading the pool’s score, but it is the only public number that moves with trap hits across many providers at once. The free email auditor returns it from a pasted header.

Blocklists. Spamhaus ZEN and DBL, SpamCop, Barracuda and the Validity RPBL cover most of the impact. Check the sending IP and the domains in your links, since a listed link domain filters an otherwise clean message.

Inbox placement tests. Everything above is what the providers choose to tell you. A seed-list test shows where the mail actually lands, which is the number the checklist cannot give you. How to run one covers the setup.

If you manage several client domains, this is what Domain Health inside InboxStack Brain does on a schedule: it pulls the Postmaster V2 compliance rows and spam rate, SNDS, Sender Score and blocklist state for every domain and IP, and Radar Monitor alerts you when any of them moves. The point is knowing on the day the row flips, not the week a client forwards the complaint.

How to rebuild after a hit

This is the sequence that works, whether the trigger was a complaint spike, a bad list, or a listing.

1. Stop the send that caused it. Pause every campaign to the segment or list source involved. Keep transactional mail running if its spam rate is clean.
2. Find the day and the campaign. Match the spike in the Feedback loop chart to a Feedback-ID, then cross-check Yahoo ARF reports and SNDS data for the same day. If nothing spikes but the Authentication line fell, it is a records problem, not a list problem.
3. Fix the row that says Needs work. Restore the DKIM selector, repair SPF, add the List-Unsubscribe-Post header, fix the PTR. Confirm with the Google Admin Toolbox Check MX tool, because the compliance page reads the configuration Gmail saw when messages arrived, not your current DNS.
4. Cut the list. Remove hard bounces, anyone unsubscribed but not yet suppressed, and anyone with no open or click in 90 days. Do not re-send to the purchased list under any framing.
5. Request delisting only after the fix. Spamhaus and the others re-list quickly if the behaviour continues.
6. Restart small and engaged. Send to the 20 to 30% of the list that opened or clicked in the last 30 days, and hold the daily spam rate below 0.1%.
7. Grow volume 20 to 30% a week while the spam rate holds and the Delivery errors line stays flat. Google’s ramping guidance says to avoid sudden jumps.
8. Check the compliance page on day 7. That is when Google says the status can reflect your changes. If a row is still Needs work, the fix did not reach the mail Gmail is receiving.

Plan on 2 to 4 weeks before volume is back to normal, longer with a listing in the mix, and expect to prove the domain again at each provider separately.

Frequently asked questions

Does Google Postmaster Tools still show a domain reputation score?

No. Google retired the Domain Reputation and IP Reputation dashboards with the old V1 interface. Postmaster Tools V2 shows a Compliance status page that marks each sender requirement Compliant, Needs work or No data found, plus spam rate, feedback loop, SPF/DKIM/DMARC pass rates, TLS and delivery error charts.

What does Compliant mean in Postmaster Tools V2?

Compliant means your mail to personal Gmail accounts meets that one requirement in Google’s Email sender guidelines, based on messages Gmail received over a rolling multi-day window. Needs work means the requirement is unmet and Gmail is treating you as non-compliant on it. After a fix, the status can take up to 7 days to change.

What spam rate does Gmail require?

Gmail tells senders to keep the user-reported spam rate in Postmaster Tools below 0.1% and never let it reach 0.3%. Rates above 0.1% already hurt inbox delivery for bulk senders, and bulk senders above 0.3% are not eligible for mitigation until they stay below 0.3% for 7 consecutive days.

Which requirements does the Compliance status page check?

For every sender: SPF and DKIM, forward and reverse DNS records, RFC 5322 message formatting, TLS encryption, and user-reported spam rate. For senders of roughly 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail it adds DMARC, one-click unsubscribe, and honoring unsubscribes within 48 hours.

How can I see how my domain is doing if Gmail hides the score?

Read the V2 Compliance status page and the Spam rate and Feedback loop charts for Gmail, Microsoft SNDS for per-IP data at Outlook.com, the Yahoo Sender Hub complaint feedback loop for Yahoo and AOL, Sender Score for a 0 to 100 IP view, and a blocklist check for Spamhaus and other lists. Add inbox placement tests to see where mail lands.

Does switching ESPs or IPs reset my standing with Gmail?

No. Gmail’s compliance status is calculated per primary domain, with subdomain traffic folded in, so a new IP or ESP carries the same domain and the same history. Fix why the complaints or failures happened first; the new infrastructure only helps once the domain is clean.

How long does recovery take after a complaint spike?

Gmail says it can take up to 7 days after fixes for the spam rate and compliance status to come back within limits. In practice, plan on 2 to 4 weeks of reduced, engaged-only sending before volume returns to normal, and longer if you also landed on a blocklist.