Google redirected everyone to Postmaster Tools v2 on 30 September 2025 and retired the v1 API by the end of that year. The change people actually noticed came with it: the Domain Reputation and IP Reputation dashboards are gone.

If your deliverability process was "check whether the bar is green", that process no longer exists. Here is what replaced it, and why the replacement is more useful.

What was removed

The old dashboards showed a four-tier score — Bad, Low, Medium, High — for your domain and for each sending IP. It was the number everyone screenshotted, and it was almost impossible to act on. A domain could drop from High to Medium with no corresponding change in anything you controlled, and recover a week later for reasons that were never visible.

The score was Google's internal judgement, compressed into four buckets, with no breakdown. You could watch it move. You could not find out why.

What is still there

Three things, and they are the three that matter:

Spam rate — the proportion of your delivered mail that recipients marked as spam. This is the number Google actually acts on.
Compliance status — a Pass or Needs Work verdict against the bulk sender requirements, replacing the old four-tier display.
Feedback loop data — identifiers you attach to outgoing mail so complaints come back attributable to a campaign or a stream.

Authentication, encryption and delivery error breakdowns remain as well.

Spam rate is the signal now

The stated ceiling is 0.3%. Treat 0.1% as the operational target, and understand why the gap matters: the figure is a trailing average over a rolling window. By the time it reads 0.3% you have been over the line for days, and filtering decisions were already being made during those days.

At 0.1% you have room to absorb one bad send. At 0.3% you have none.

Do the arithmetic for your own volume before you decide the threshold is generous. Three complaints in a thousand messages is 0.3%. On a stream of five hundred a day that is one and a half complaints. One irritated recipient on a quiet day moves the number more than most people expect.

Compliance status is binary on purpose

Pass or Needs Work. There is no partial credit, and that is the point — the requirements are not a scale. Either your mail is authenticated and aligned, or it is not. Either one-click unsubscribe works without a login, or it does not.

Needs Work tells you to go and check the specific requirements rather than interpreting a colour. It is less satisfying and more actionable.

What to do instead of watching a score

The honest answer is that the reputation dashboard was never a control surface. It was a thermometer. Removing it pushes attention to the things that actually move the temperature:

Send consistently. Volume that jumps by an order of magnitude looks like a compromised account regardless of how legitimate the campaign is.
Suppress properly. A complaint is permanent. A hard bounce is permanent. Sending to either again is the fastest way to raise the only number you can still see.
Separate your streams. Password resets should not share a reputation with a newsletter. If one stream earns complaints, the other should not inherit them.
Keep the authentication aligned, not merely passing. See why a valid DKIM signature still lands in spam for the distinction.

Monitoring without the dashboard

Your own logs were always a better early-warning system than Postmaster Tools, which reports with a delay measured in days. A rise in 4xx deferrals from one provider shows up in your queue within the hour. A change in the ratio of deferrals to deliveries for a single recipient domain is visible immediately.

Watch deferral rate per recipient domain, bounce classification over time, and the text of the remote responses themselves. Providers frequently say exactly what is wrong in the SMTP response, and almost nobody reads it.

Check where your domain currently stands with the DMARC checker and the SPF checker — both free, no account.

Postmaster Tools v2 retired reputation scores. Now what?