What is an SPF Record?
I often hear this question. What is an SPF Record?
The complicated answer to the above question is this:
SPF means Sender Policy Framework.
What does that mean? Well, I’ll make it as simple as I can. It’s basically a DNS record that is put in place that lists the allows mail servers (SMTP Servers) that you have authorized to send email for your domain. Why would you want this? Simply to help fight the war against forged or spoofed messages. How so? Basically, the receiving mail server (or host) if they are checking for SPF records, it will make sure the message it’s receiving is coming from the allowed hosts.
So for example, for bahjons.com, I only want messages to be accepted if it’s coming from the mail server: mailserver2.bahjons.com – I could create an SPF record only allowing this host. When a message is sent to Yahoo Mail, they will check to make sure the message is from mailserver2.bahjons.com. You can find out how to create an SPF record at www.openspf.org
If you want to be able to check to see if a domain has an SPF record, you can use a validation tool like this one.
I hope that helps.
