Gmail

What they published

In their own words.

• Every sender needs SPF or DKIM, forward and reverse DNS, and TLS.

  Google Workspace Admin Help, Email sender guidelines · publisher states no date

• Above 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts, SPF and DKIM both become required, along with DMARC and alignment.

  “For direct email, the domain in the sender's From: header must be aligned with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain”

  Google Workspace Admin Help, Email sender guidelines · publisher states no date

• A shared IP carries everyone's behaviour, not just yours.

  “The activity of any senders using a shared IP address affects the reputation of all senders for that shared IP address.”

  Google Workspace Admin Help, Email sender guidelines · publisher states no date

• Personal Gmail accounts require a DKIM key of at least 1024 bits.

  “Sending to personal Gmail accounts requires a DKIM key of 1024 bits or longer”

  Google Workspace Admin Help, Email sender guidelines · publisher states no date

The numbers

Only the ones they printed themselves.

• 0.3%

  Spam rate, the level to stay under

  Every sender, measured in Postmaster Tools

  Google Workspace Admin Help, Email sender guidelines · publisher states no date

• 0.10%

  Spam rate, the level Google actually tells you to aim for

  Stated alongside the 0.3% line, and the more useful of the two

  Google Workspace Admin Help, Email sender guidelines · publisher states no date

• 5,000 messages per day

  Bulk sender threshold

  Messages to Gmail accounts

  Google Workspace Admin Help, Email sender guidelines · publisher states no date

• 1024 bits

  Minimum DKIM key length

  Sending to personal Gmail accounts

  Google Workspace Admin Help, Email sender guidelines · publisher states no date

The negative space

3 things everybody repeats that Gmail has never said.

An absence is harder to check than a claim, so each one links the page where you can confirm the words are not there — and where Gmail states outright that it will not publish something, that refusal is quoted.

• Gmail weights domain reputation over IP reputation.

  Google's guidelines describe both and rank neither. There is no published statement that one outweighs the other, and the Postmaster Tools dashboards that once showed the two side by side were retired — so the number people argue about is not merely unranked, it is no longer published at all.

  Google Workspace Admin Help, Email sender guidelines · publisher states no date

  Dated version: Google Postmaster Tools retired the reputation dashboards

• There is a Gmail sender score you can raise.

  Google has never published a numeric sender score, a scoring formula, or any reputation value you could audit. The guidelines state requirements and thresholds and describe no mechanism. Every score in this category is a vendor's own invention, sold back to you.

  Google Workspace Admin Help, Email sender guidelines · publisher states no date

• Gmail tells you why a message went to spam.

  It does not. Google publishes the failures it returns at the SMTP layer and the thresholds it enforces on; it publishes nothing about content classification for an individual message. Anyone reconstructing a per-message reason is guessing.

  Google Workspace Admin Help, Email sender guidelines · publisher states no date

Getting unblocked

The removal path, and whose job it is to file it.

Every delisting guide tells you where the form is. The half nobody prints is whether you can complete it: on a shared sending pool the listed address is your platform’s and the submission is theirs to make, so a marketer sent to the form arrives without the one thing it asks for.

• There is no Gmail delisting form. Gmail has no public blocklist to be removed from, so the only lever is the sending behaviour Postmaster Tools measures.

  postmaster.google.com

  This one needs you

  Nobody can file this for you because there is nothing to file. The spam rate is produced by your list and your content, and it is the only input Google publishes.

  The trap: Any service selling Gmail delisting is selling something that does not exist. What does exist is the Postmaster Tools spam-rate graph, which is free.

  Google Workspace Admin Help, Email sender guidelines · publisher states no date