An SPF record or Sender Policy Framework record lists the designated mail servers for a domain (or subdomain). It helps establish the legitimacy of your mail server and reduces the chances of spoofing, which occurs when someone fakes the headers on an email to make it look like it’s coming from your domain, even though the message did not originate from your Linode. Spammers sometimes try to do this to get around spam filters. An SPF record for your domain tells other receiving mail servers which outgoing server(s) are valid sources of email, so they can reject spoofed email from your domain that has originated from unauthorized servers. A very basic SPF record looks like the following:
1 |
example.com TXT "v=spf1 a ~all" |
In your SPF record, you should list all the mail servers from which you send mail, and then exclude all the others. Your SPF record will have a domain or subdomain, type (which is TXT, or SPF if your name server supports it), and text (which starts with “v=spf1” and contains the SPF record settings).
If your KLhost is the only mail server you use, you should be able to use the example record above. With this SPF record, the receiving server will check the IP addresses of both the sending server and the IP address of example.com. If the IPs match, the check passes. If not, the check will “soft fail” (i.e., the message will be marked but will not automatically be rejected for failing the SPF check).
NOTE:
Make sure your SPF records are not too strict. If you accidentally exclude a legitimate mail server, its messages could get marked as spam. We strongly recommend visiting openspf.org to learn how SPF records work and how to construct one that works for your setup. Their examples are also helpful.
