AntiJunked: An SPF Tutorial

In the past I posted about not getting your emails junked. Well I posted in a forum about it and there seems to be some confusion about how to get it all working. This is what I did:

1) Using whatever script / email client you’ll be using to send out mail, send an email to yourself. Look at the full headers. (If you are using Gmail, it makes it super easy. Just look for “Received-SPF:”). The idea is to find the server name and/or IP address your site is sending mail from. In my case, it is secure.theclixnetwork.net

2) Start the SPF Setup Wizard. Enter the domain name you are sending email from (not with). For example, I am sending email from myemail@startxchange.com WITH secure.theclixnetwork.net. So in this example I would use startxchange.com

(the idea is, I want to tell other people that it’s ok if email comes from startxchange.com, but the server sending the email says it’s a different domain)

3) Answer the yes/no questions. I put yes yes no. You might be different but in all likely hood it isn’t.

4) In the a: box, put the server name that is sending out the mail if it isn’t your from domain. In my case, I would put “secure.theclixnetwork.net”.

5) Because I know this is the only way mail is sent from StartXchange, I can leave the other two boxes empty. However you would want to add more mail servers and IPs if you know you’ll send email from them. This is more for networks that have many servers that send out email. In my case, I have many IP addresses but for StartXchange it’ll always be sent out the same IP address.

6) I won’t be including any domains, because all StartXchange emails are sent from my server. However if I were using clixnetwork.com’s SPF, I would add gmail.com in the include, because I use gmail to send it. If you use POP3 and use your ISP’s outgoing mail server, you’ll want to put their domain in here.

7) I know for a fact this is all the info for StartXchange, so I check yes. If you do this, be warned that if you send email from your site via another means before updating the SPF record, it’ll be marked as spam by any server using SPF. However it also means that nobody can fake sending mail as you!

That’s all there is to it really. When I first did it, I made the mistake of putting my sending mail server in the “include” feild. It created some errors ;-)