An SPF record is the mechanism that lets a mail server verify the sending address of incoming email. This means it prevents, or at least reduces, spam and email spoofing.
What does SPF record mean?
The acronym stands for Sender Policy Framework, a validation system for incoming email. If a hacker or scammer tries to use an address that looks like yours for phishing or other illegal activities, the message will be flagged.
In short, it is essential if you plan to run an email marketing campaign for your business and want to keep your messages out of the spam folder.
Spoofing and phishing scams
Sometimes you receive an email from a sender you know (an individual or a company). The name matches, the domain in the address matches too, so the email looks genuine. You open it without a second thought and end up caught in a cybercriminal’s net.
To keep this from happening with the emails you send, whether advertising campaigns, business communications, newsletters, and so on, you need to set up an SPF record.
How do you set up Sender Policy Framework?
In practice, SPF works automatically, “behind the scenes” of the mailbox, without the recipient noticing. It checks that the sender’s address matches the declared sending host. Put simply, it verifies the authenticity of the message.
That is why it matters to anyone who uses email marketing regularly: it helps keep messages from landing in spam or being rejected. But how is it used? It is published as a DNS record on the authoritative name server for the domain, in the form of a TXT record.
Checking your SPF
First, check the status of your SPF record with a dedicated tool such as Mxtoolbox. Here are the steps to follow:
- send an email to ping.tools.mxtoolbox.com.
- after a short while, you will receive a reply from [email protected].
- it contains initial feedback and a link to the detailed results.
Another method is to send an email to yourself. Once it arrives, inspect the email header. Depending on your email client, you can do this from the “View” menu or by right-clicking the message. Received-SPF is the header field to look at. You can get even more precise results with an email header analyzer tool.
Advantages and disadvantages
Most internet service providers now require an SPF record. Without one, your emails will be flagged as “not secure”. As a result, recipients may be reluctant to open them, or the email client itself may send them to spam.
You could lose dozens upon dozens of views, and your open rate would plummet. To prevent this, most email providers set it up automatically on your domain.
Keep in mind, however, that an SPF record alone is not enough to protect against spam. It is a method to combine with others, such as DKIM and DMARC.