What is an SPF record?
SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, is a method of indicating which mail server is allowed to send e-mail for your domain name. So if a spammer sends out mail using your domain name, it can be caught in the recipient's spam filter as the machine sending the mail is not the official one linked to your domain name.
SPF makes it easy for a domain, whether it's an ISP, a business, a school or a charity, to say, "I only send mail from these machines. If any other machine claims that I'm sending mail from there, they're lying."
When an AOL user sends mail to you, an email server that belongs to AOL connects to an email server that belongs to you. AOL uses SPF to publish the addresses of its email servers. When the message comes in, your email servers can tell if the server on the other end of the connection belongs to AOL or not.
SPF aims to prevent spammers from ruining other people's reputations. If they want to send spam, they should at least do it under their own name!
As a recipient of mail, SPF can help you sort the good from the bad. Your own spam filters can be used to reject mail coming from an invalid source. SPF is not a universally accepted standard. It is growing in popularity, but you would be unwise to reject incoming mail because it does not have an SPF record. If the domain belonging to the incoming mail has an SPF record and it doesn't match the incoming mail, then you can safely reject the mail. If the domain on the incoming mail doesn't have an SPF record, you may set your filter to regard the mail as suspicious at most.
As a sender of mail, SPF can help your mail get through other people's spam filters. If you are willing to confirm the valid sources of mail for your domain, then other people are more likely to trust what you send. To get SPF to work for your domain, the ISP that handles your domain name will need to add an SPF record listing the valid sources of mail for your domain. At Ambit New Media we automatically add an SPF record that allows mail from any of our servers. If you use software on your PC or in-house server that acts as a true mail server (i.e. sends mail directly to the recipients and not via your ISP), then we will need to know the IP address(es) it uses to add them to the list of valid addresses.
Visit the Sender Policy Framework web site.
Ambit New Media's default SPF record is
v=spf1 a MX ip4:217.64.112.0/20 -all
