You have to be a high volume sender with a good reputation (low spam reports) to get access to these tools.

And they don't tell you whether you meet those criteria, until after you go to the trouble of logging in and serving a DNS TXT record for ownership verification, as I just found. Granted, I didn't expect to qualify, but it would have been nice if they'd told me up front.

Yes, but at least they're using the same verification mechanism as elsewhere so if you have already added the domain to Google Webmaster for example under the same Google Account, it will be automatically verified.

The reputation requirements here are a very low bar; as far as I can tell it's effectively "don't be a botnet".

So they send you five million "I'm not a robot" recaptchas, and let you through if you only click one...

Fun, but it doesn't scale. Google can only do this because they have a near-monopoly on email. What would you say if I gave you tools to whitelist yourself on my email server? You'd tell me to get my spamfilter straight, or more likely, simply ignore me.

I'm not against Gmail, just like I'm not against Outlook.com or Yahoo mail or something. It's just that providing tools only work for players in a power position (i.e. Google) who can afford to ignore small players (i.e. me), and what's more, this further strengthens their power position: the better they can detect spam so more people will start using it (the postmaster tools are there to help people prove they are good, thus helping Gmail distinguish).

I don't have access unless I use work contacts to push and I won't do that.