Getting an AMP sender approved by Gmail.

The Gmail sender registration form for AMP4Email looks like a five field intake. It is not. It is the visible surface of a review that scores your sending discipline over the previous month.

Most rejections are not really about the form. They are about the sending pattern the form triggered a review of. Applications come back because the reviewer looked at your Postmaster Tools numbers and did not like what they saw.

Here is what clean looks like from the reviewer's side.

DKIM alignment

The signing domain in the DKIM record has to match the visible From domain. Not just a valid DKIM signature. An aligned one. If your From address is news@brand.com and your DKIM signature is signed by mailer.esp.com, alignment fails, and DMARC treats you as if you had no signature at all.

Fix it by publishing a CNAME from a subdomain of your sending domain to whatever DKIM public key your ESP hosts, and having the ESP sign as that subdomain. Every serious ESP supports this. The setup is boring. Skipping it kills applications.

SPF and DMARC in a passing state

SPF has to authorise every IP your ESP sends from. DMARC needs a published policy. Neither is enough on its own. Both have to pass, and both have to pass consistently across the sending window Gmail is looking at, which is roughly the previous thirty days.

The specific bar most applications trip on is not the presence of the records. It is intermittent failures. A forwarding path that breaks SPF. A campaign sent from a secondary IP that was not in the SPF record. A DMARC policy of none that reveals a stream of failing subdomains you did not know about. Gmail sees the aggregate. Fix the aggregate before you apply.

Low spam rates in Postmaster Tools

Postmaster Tools shows spam rate as a percentage. Gmail's threshold for accepting new sender programs is a spam rate below 0.1 percent, held consistently. Not once. Not most days. Every day, for the window under review.

The correct reading is that a spam rate spike in the month before you apply is a rejection. Even if it was a bad send that you learned from. The reviewer is not there to interpret intent. They are looking at the graph.

A working sample that passes the validator

The form asks for a sample AMP email. The sample has to render in Gmail with the AMP part live. Which means it has to pass the AMP4Email validator with zero errors, contain a valid amp4email doctype line, load only from allowlisted CDNs, and use amp-src or amp-list endpoints that respond correctly with CORS headers and a valid AMP JSON payload.

Send yourself the sample first. Open it in a Gmail account. Confirm the interactive part renders and the interaction works end to end. If it works for you at your inbox, it will pass the reviewer's test. If you skipped this step because the code looked right, prepare to get bounced.

Why applications actually come back

The common rejection reasons, in rough order of frequency: spam rate above threshold in the trailing window, DMARC failures the applicant did not know about, an unregistered sender address in the sample, a validator warning in the sample the applicant treated as ignorable, and a bounce rate high enough to trigger a broader deliverability review.

None of these are secrets. All of them are checkable before you submit. The reason applications fail on the first try is almost always that the applicant treated the form as a paperwork exercise and the reviewer treated it as a signal about sending hygiene. The two views are irreconcilable.

How to handle a rejection

A rejection email from the AMP team is terse. It tells you the category but rarely the specific record. The temptation is to argue. Do not argue. Fix the deficiency, wait long enough for the trailing window to reflect the fix, and resubmit.

The trailing window matters. If Gmail is looking at thirty days of sending and you fixed your DMARC policy yesterday, a resubmission tomorrow is going to fail on the same signal. Give the fix time to sit inside the window Gmail is scoring. Two weeks is usually enough. A month is safer.

“The registration is the audit. Pass the audit first, then submit.”