SPF Records

A few weeks ago my colleague came up with a very interesting question about how do the Bulk Mailing Solution Providers send mails on our behalf using our domain names. And that's really a very important concept that should be crystal clear to a Messaging Architect. What we did was to add a SPF Record to authorize Bulk Mailing SP's to send mails on our behalf.


SPF Record : Sender Policy Framework (SPF), is an e-mail validation system that allows administrators to specify which hosts are allowed to send e-mail from a given domain by creating a specific SPF record. Mail Exchanger then use the DNS to check that mail from a given domain is being sent by a host sanctioned by that domain's administrators.

If the domain is hosted on a local DNS server, you will need to manually add the TXT SPF record to your DNS Server. The following procedure explains how to add a TXT SPF record on the DNS server included with Windows 2003/2008 R2 Server:



  • Login to the DNS server using administrative privileges
  • Open the 'DNS' Console in 'Administrative Tools'
  • Expand 'DNS' > 'Forward Lookup Zones'
  • Select and open the domain in which you wish to add the SPF record. Right-click in the record list and select 'Other New Records..' from the menu.
  • Select the 'Text (TXT)' record and click on the 'Create Record...' button
  • Type the SPF record data in the 'Text' textbox. Click the 'OK' button.
  • Click on the 'Done' button to close the window and the SPF record is added



 
Verification:
To check whether the SPF Record has been successfully added click on the following link and type in your domain name and hit GET SPF RECORD.
 http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html


A successful SPF record addition should look as shown below:


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