SPF Mail Protection
Published September 1, 2007 by Me
Nowadays more and more spam mail is being sent using fake email addresses and servers – Well, it’s fake as far as the spammers sending the mails are concerned but, when it’s your address they’re using, it can mean considerable inconvenience dealing with bounced messages that you never sent and trying to restore your integrity.SPF (or Sender Policy Framework) sets out to combat this practice of Sender Address Forgery by inserting an additional text record in the DNS record for each domain, labeling the mail server or servers which are authentic senders of mail for that domain.
More and more mail servers now check that the server sending mail to their users is listed as a genuine and authorized sender of mail for that domain, and will either “bounce” (return to sender, undelivered) or “drop” (delete) the incoming mail if it does not pass the SPF test.
As spam can account for well over 50% of the mail received by our mail servers on a day to day basis, we have been using SPF checking for some time on the servers which handle incoming mail to our own domains.
Adding an SPF record to your domain’s DNS record is simple – It is just a one-line text record, and there are plenty of on-line resources available to help you formulate the correct format. Once you have the correct record in place, you will find that mail is accepted far more easily by the main bulk-mail handlers, particularly Hotmail, who were one of the first services to initiate SPF checking back in 2004.
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