SPF (Sender Policy Framework) Records
By default, the SPF record added will cover your email service with us however you may wish to add additional hostnames or IP addresses to your SPF record to cover email being sent from your website or other sending environments. You can do this by editing the SPF record via your DNS management portal.
The most common options for spf records are:
| ip4 | The ip4 tag allows you to specify individual IP addresses that are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain. IPv6 addresses can be defined using the ip6 tag. |
| include | The include tag allows you to define which organisation or hostname which are allowed to send out email for the domain. So for example, spf.iomartmail.com resolves the list of IP addresses that are used to send email on our own email platform. |
| all | The all tag is an important part of the SPF record as it indicates what policy should be applied when recipient servers detect a server which is not listed in your SPF. |
Lets take a further look at the policy options for the all tag.
| -all | This is a Hard Fail where any servers that aren’t listed in the SPF record are not authorized to send email. This instructs the recipient server to reject or mark the email as spam. |
| ~all | This is a Soft Fail where if the email is received from a server that isn’t listed, the email will be marked as a soft fail (emails will be accepted but marked). |
| +all | This is a Pass tag. This allows any server to send email from your domain. This is not recommended as it will increase the chance of malicious emails being sent from your domain. |
An example record could look like this:
v=spf1 ip4:62.233.120.35 include:_spf.iomartmail.com ~all
An IPv4 address has been specified, along with a include for a hostname to cover multiple IP addresses and the all tag has the soft fail option.
Checks
Once you have your SPF record created and added to your domains DNS, it’s good practice to use an SPF checker to test that the syntax is valid.
Add SPF in your control panel
You can add SPF records from the email security section of your control panel which can be accessed via Email Management.
Email Management > Select Edit beside they domain you wish to add SPF for > Scroll down to Email Security
