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SPF mail protection
By Tony Walker - Support Manager | September 2, 2007
Nowadays more and more spam mail is being sent using fake email addresses - 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 authorised 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 over 50% of the mail received by our mail servers on a day to day basis, we here at Netnibble have been using SPF checking for some time on the mail servers which handle incoming mail to our own domains.
What I would like to do now is to encourage our customers (who haven’t done so already) to add SPF entries to their own DNS records, so that their outbound mail is properly identified as genuine. We are unable to just do this across the board for you as some customers use alternative or secondary mail servers to send mail from, about which we have no details and, if we just add the SPF record that relates to the server you are hosted on we could, in effect, wrongly label genuine mail from your other mail servers as spam.
So here is what you need to do:
If you only send mail from your domain via the Netnibble server that it is hosted on, please just raise a ticket to Support asking us to add an SPF entry to your DNS records labelling it as such. We will then make the appropriate addition for you, and confirm it back to you.
If you use another or other mail server(s) to also send mail from your domain, please raise a ticket giving us the mail server name(s) and IP address(es) of the additional server(s) so that we may include that information in the SPF record for your domain.
If you are not sure which of the above options apply to you, just let us know through the ticket system and we will endeavour to assist you in working out the correct SPF record for your domain(s).
Resources:
- An introduction to SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
- An on-line tool to help work out your SPF entry
- Wikipedia entry - Sender Policy Framework
Topics: Email traffic |
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