Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records allow domain owners to specify which hosts are permitted to send email on behalf of their domains, making it hard to forge From: addresses. We strongly encourage you to publish SPF records for your domain -- having these records in place will ultimately help fight spam.

These are TXT records added to the DNS records of your domain name.

If you would like help configuring these, especially if you are using program that sends emails through a PHP mail() function, contact us.

For clients that exclusively use our server to send email from their domain, we recommend something like:

"v=spf1 mx ~all"

If you are using Google Apps with your domain name for email, your SPF record might look like this:

"v=spf1 mx include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all" 

(Google's documentation is located here.)

You can find a more complete overview of SPF syntax at http://www.openspf.org/SPF_Record_Syntax, and a good general overview of SPF at http://spf.idimo.com/. There's also a very nice human-readable article at the LinuxJournal here.

Add to Favourites

Print this Article