When Google starts filtering you

Gmail almost never tells you that it is filtering you. There is no bounce, no error code, and no notification. Your send reports as delivered, your dashboard looks normal, and replies quietly stop.

That gap between delivered and seen is the whole problem. Delivery means Gmail accepted the message. Placement means Gmail put it somewhere a human will look. Only the first one produces a status code.

The signal that actually tells you

Split your open rate by recipient domain. That is it. That single view separates the two explanations people usually argue about.

Bad copy or bad targeting drags every provider down at once, because the mail is equally uninteresting to everyone. Filtering is provider-specific: Gmail slides while Outlook, Yahoo, and the corporate domains hold roughly where they were.

Open rates are noisy for other reasons, so read the trend across several sends rather than one. A single bad Tuesday is not a filtering event.

What Postmaster Tools will and will not show you

Google Postmaster Tools reports spam rate, domain reputation, IP reputation, and authentication results for mail you send to Gmail addresses. When it works it is the only direct read on what Google thinks of you.

The catch is volume. The dashboards need meaningful daily volume to Gmail addresses before they populate, commonly put at a few thousand a day, and most teams doing careful outbound never send that much. If you are below the threshold you get empty charts, which is not the same as good news.

The number that matters most is the spam rate, and Google publishes the line in its sender guidelines: 0.10%, with 0.30% as the level you should never reach. That first figure is one complaint per thousand delivered messages. At a thousand sends a day, a single person hitting the spam button puts you at the line.

Fix in this order

Authentication first, because it is cheap to check and catastrophic to get wrong. If SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment all pass, stop looking at DNS. It is not the cause. See warming a new sending domain for the records themselves.

Then, in order:

1. Cut volume by half. Immediately, before diagnosing anything else. Continuing at the volume that triggered filtering makes recovery longer.
2. Suppress the cold end of the list. Anyone who has not opened in ninety days is contributing risk and no upside. An engagement score does this sorting for you, but a manual ninety-day cut works fine.
3. Fix targeting before copy. A good email to the wrong person still generates complaints. Complaints are what Gmail actually measures.
4. Rewrite the opener. Only now. Copy is the thing everyone reaches for first and the thing that matters least when placement is the problem.
5. Hold the reduced volume for two weeks. Then ramp the way you would warm a new domain.

The part nobody wants to hear

There is no appeal. There is no support ticket, no reset, and no vendor who can call Google on your behalf, whatever their sales page says.

Reputation is a rolling measure of whether people want your mail. The only mechanism for changing it is sending mail people want, consistently, for long enough that the average moves. Plan for weeks rather than days, treat any more precise number you read as folklore since none of the providers publish one, and know that the most common reason it takes longer is that somebody quietly turned the volume back up in week two.

FAQ