How do I set up an SPF record?

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Edge100x
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How do I set up an SPF record?

Post by Edge100x »

An SPF record is used to check the sender of an email against allowed senders to confirm that it hasn't been spoofed (sent from a 3rd party while pretending to be from a real email address). Spammers and scammers frequently spoof emails.

Because spoofing prevention is so important, Google and some other email hosts are now requiring that every external domain set up an SPF record, by otherwise showing a warning for any emails sent from that domain. This means that if you have a domain set up through our webhosting, and you use it for email (whether through us or a third-party), you may run into problems unless you configure an SPF record.

An SPF record is implemented as a TXT record in a special format. The record needs to be attached to the domain/subdomain that email is to be sent from, which means that it is usually attached to the root domain name (@).

If you have your email account hosted with us, and you use our webmail or a separate email client through our mail server, this is how you would need to set up the SPF record in order to allow only your webserver account and our mail server to relay them:
  1. Open the control panel for your webhosting with us.
  2. Click the "Domains" tab.
  3. Under your domain name, you should see a row with "@" for the subdomain. Near the right, there is a wedge or arrow to the left of an "x". Click that wedge to expand the advanced options for this subdomain.
  4. Check the "Set a TXT record" box.
  5. Enter this into the text field that it displays:

    Code: Select all

    v=spf1 a mx -all
  6. Click "Submit changes".
If you use a different mail server to send email, have hosted email from someone else, or use a proxy such as Cloudflare, you will need to use a different SPF specification. You can use a site like http://www.spfwizard.net/ to help you generate this.
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