What is an SPF Record?

Picture this: you’ve made the perfect email for your new campaign, uploaded your contact list, tested everything to make sure it’s working, got the green light to send, but after a couple days you see little to no engagement in your analytics. What went wrong? You did the testing, it hit your inbox fine, there’s nothing fishy about your content – how could no one be clicking on my email?

While it may be easy to believe that something on your server is causing these emails to be sent to a SPAM folder, more often than not, you are probably seeing what is known as “backscatter”. This is especially important to know when using marketing automation platforms, such as MindFire Studio. Backscatter occurs then emails are incorrectly sent to SPAM folders since the sender address is being spoofed (making the message appear to originate from your domain when you’re actually using an external software such as MindFire Studio). So how do we avoid the mess of emails being delivered to the SPAM inbox? At MindFire, we recommend that all bulk email senders set up an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record in the DNS settings of their “From Address” domain (i.e. if you’re sending from example@mindfireinc.com, the sending domain would be mindfireinc.com). SPF records were
created to combat the issues of emails being spoofed.

SPF records are added to your domain’s DNS as a TXT record. To create a record for your
domain:

1. Log in to the administrative area for your domain
2. Locate the page from which you can update the DNS records
3. Select “Add” in the Records section
4. Create a TXT record
5. In the Host section put “@”
6. In the TXT value put “v=spf1 include:email-od.com ~all”
7. Click “Save”

And that’s all it takes! Once this entry is placed within the DNS zone, no further configuration is necessary to take advantage of servers that integrate SPF checking into their anti-spam systems. This short little process can potentially save you so much time and frustration, it’d be crazy not to be safe and add SPF records before launching your email campaign!