Sharing access to Google Postmaster Tools

As a delivery consultant, I always ask clients to share their Google postmaster reports with me. As Gmail is one of the bigger delivery challenges for a lot of senders, having access to the postmaster tools helps tease out issues. I had some issues earlier this week getting access to tools and so brought up a conversation on one of the delivery lists. The nice folks there helped me get it solved.
A few hours later someone asked me how do I get access and I thought that was a brilliant idea for a blog post today.

Site owner grants access.

The owner of the postmaster tools account goes to http://postmaster.google.com and hovers over the domain to share. A context menu pops up.
PostmasterTools1
Click on the “Manage Users” link.
PostmasterTools2
Adding a user is as simple as clicking on the big red button and typing in the users email address. This address must be either a gmail.com address or a domain hosted at Google apps.
Once that’s done, tell the user they have permission to access the document.

User adds domain to their dashboard.

Before the data is visible, the user must add the domain to their dashboard. Again, click the big red button in the bottom corner.
A dialog box pops up asking for the domain used to authenticate your email.
PostmasterTools3
Type in the domain name. It should now appear in their dashboard.

Things to remember.

Only gmail.com or google apps hosted email addresses can be used for the Postmaster tools. Those of us using our own domains on different hosting must create a gmail.com address in order to see Postmaster tools.
Postmaster tools only provide data after a threshold volume is reached. We have no data for wordtothewise.com, for instance, because we simply don’t send enough mail.
Happy Investigating!

December 2016: The Month in Email
If I can't tell, it's spam

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December 2016: The Month in Email

Happy New Year! We’re looking forward to some interesting new projects this year, both for our clients and for Word to the Wise. Stay tuned!
December was a slow month for blogging, with everything going on. But we’re back on the horse now and ready to blog for 2017.
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List and subscription management continue to be hot topics, especially in the wake of the listbombing attacks earlier this year. Earlier this month, I presented a webinar on listbombing for the EEC and DMA to review the attacks and discuss best practices for companies to manage subscriptions. For Ask Laura, I wrote about the unsubscribe process and how senders can best manage those requests to keep their lists current and compliant.
With all the holiday mail flying around, Steve wrote up a good post about the challenges of DNS hosting and issues customers may have reaching your site. He also wrote about canonicalization, a process for comparing things to see if they are the same, which is useful for understanding how messages change during the delivery process. It’s important to understand how this works with DKIM, as that process specifically looks at changes to messages in delivery to validate them.
I wrote a post about how delivery at Gmail is a bit different from other mail providers, which can lead to intermittent delivery problems, and got some useful information in the comments about some upcoming process changes. And as always, unwanted email is SPAM. It doesn’t matter if you call it outreach or prospecting, or “here’s something you might find interesting!” Still SPAM.

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Gmail abuse and postmaster addresses

A long time ago, Steve wrote a post about setting up abuse and postmaster addresses for Google hosted domains. Google has gone through a couple iterations of the interface since then, as you can see by the comment stream.
I checked with some people who have Google hosted domains and they have confirmed that abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses can be set up by creating a group. When you create the group you can then add yourself to the group and get the mail that comes into abuse@ and postmaster@.
 

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Google Postmaster Tools

Earlier this month Google announced a new set of tools for senders at their Postmaster Tools site. To get into the site you need to login to Google, but they also have a handy support page that doesn’t require a login for folks who want to see what the page is about.
We did register, but don’t send enough mail to get any data back from Google. However, the nice folks at SendGrid were kind enough to share their experiences with me and show me what the site looked like with real data, when I spoke at their recent customer meeting.
Who can register?
Anyone can register for Google Postmaster tools. All you need is the domain authenticated by DKIM (the d= value) or by SPF (the Return Path value).
Who can see data?
Google is only sharing data with trusted domains and only if a minimum volume is sent from those domains. They don’t describe what a trusted domain is, but I expect the criteria include a domain with some history (no brand new domains) and a reasonable track record (some or all of the mail is good).
For ESPs who want to monitor all the mail they send, every mail needs to be signed with a common d= domain. Individual customers that want their own d= can do so. These customers can register for their own access to just their mail.
ESPs that want to do this need to sign with the common key first, and then with the customer’s more selective key.
How does it work?
Google collects data from DKIM and/or SPF authenticated mail, aggregates it and presents it to a Google user that has authenticated the domain.
How do I authenticate?

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