Blog

Wednesday, 10 January 2018 21:39

SPF record, preventing mailing spam

What is a SPF record?

The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an anti-spam system built on top of the existing DNS and Email Internet Infrastructure.

Spammers were impersonating domains to make offers look like they were coming from Amazon or other reputable places, but when you would click through they’d steal your credit card and run up a bill at the local Chuck E Cheese (which is where I presume mob members go to eat).

What does a SPF record do?

An SPF record defines which IP addresses are allowed to send email on behalf of a particular domain. This is tricker than it sounds as many companies have multiple different Email Service Providers for different purposes.

Common different uses:

Transactional emails from mailing systems

Internal notifications

Internal email

External email

PR/Marketing emails

Further complicating the situation is that while a company might have a name like SafeEmailSender, there is nothing stopping them from having an email sending domain like wookie-fighter.com.

What does a SPF record prevent?

Having strict SPF rules allows you to control who can send email on behalf of your domain. A good way to think of this is the reverse: who would gain by sending email on behalf of your domain.

See SPF record examples

http://www.openspf.org/SPF_Record_Syntax

Published in Dedicated Servers