SPF record

Why an SPF record?

If you send an email to somebody and both your email address and theirs is legit, then they should receive your email without any problem.

If someone pretends to be you and sends an email to someone, then it may attract a high spam value.

A technique is needed to program mail servers on the internet with what to do if it finds an email which does not come from its own domain.

To clarify, my domain is ‘megganet.com’. The header part of an email contains information including the source of the email including its source domain ‘megganet.com’. If the source of the email is not ‘megganet.com’ then, the email may be classified as spam.

An SPF record will not stop spam / spoofing by itself- its not meant to. What it does is let the receiving mail server know whether or not the email has been sent from the correct domain (or through the correct domains mail server). The recipients mail server then decides what to do with it.

Some mail server’s now require that a sender’s mail server has an SPF record.

Google

Google now requires that the DNS of a sending domain has an SPF record. If ‘megganet.com’ did not have an SPF record then I would not be able to send email to anyone with a @google.co.uk email suffix.

Our updates

We are presently updating all our domains with SPF records and this is an ongoing rollout and we will get them all updated, hopefully by the end of May 2023. If you need your domain prioritised, email me straight away.

Check your domain

Visit https://www.mimecast.com/products/dmarc-analyzer/spf-record-check/ or https://www.domaindiagnosis.com/ and enter your domain to verify its SPF record.

Want to know more – visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

This is an external link which we have no control over. At the time of writing, it is accurate.

Creating and entering an SPF record

If your domain is hosted on one server and the DNS is hosted on another then the SPF record must be entered on the server hosting your DNS. Only a person with administrator access can access your DNS settings and make the necessary changes.

Can Megganet insert your SPF record?

If your domain is hosted by us or managed by us, we can otherwise, we can not. We do not charge our clients for this DNS modification.

DMARC and DKIM

These help reduce the chances of mail spoofing and spam. These are a whole different ball game. Here, keys are needed on the senders mail server. The keys have to be exact and getting them involve getting the domain hosting company involved. This is a lot more involved so we have to charge for this service.