SPF for your own domain helps get past some of the more annoyingly twitchy providers out there - yahoo springs to mind. A record such as the one i've put in, can help: ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;blakjak.net. IN TXT ;; ANSWER SECTION: blakjak.net. 7200 IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx ptr ?all" note ?all. Doesn't enforce an absolute match. I choose not to test for spf on inbound mail, at the moment. Like any anti-spam measure it's merely part of the solution (a means to verify that mail is coming from whence it is intended, on the presumption that the admin for the domain is the one modifying the DNS) but that's all its for. Sender verification. With that in mind it's _not_ hard to quantify the benefit. It's just that many folks misinterpret or misunderstand the signifiance of what spf delivers. If you're having trouble getting your email to folks because you've published an spf record that's wrong, fix your spf record. At that point you've done the right thing and the problem is no longer yours? - Mark On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Regan Murphy wrote:
For me, it's a yes to 4 criteria (our EHLO host id does not explicitly contain smtp or mail).... Every single time I've run into problems, so far, where my clients have not received our email or we have had mail rejections, it's been a misconfiguration of email/spam software at the receiving end.
It's hard to quantify the benefits of having an SPF record - although I hope its helping prevent our IP from being RBL'd due to abuse by others - but its easy to see the admin costs of having one and having to constantly chase up problems.
-----Original Message----- From: nznog-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz [mailto:nznog-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz] On Behalf Of SIMON WALKDEN Sent: Thursday, 22 July 2010 6:11 p.m. To: Mark Wakefield Cc: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: [nznog] SPF Mail rejection
I've seen a lot of clients' outbound mail rejected in the last 12 months due to SPF issues; particularly mail being delivered to secureMX, or Xtra. The plan of attack was usually:
1. do they appear on any RBL's? (self explanatory, I know, just thought I'd list it) 2. does the HELO ID of their server match the MX record for the domain? 3. does the MX record (and HELO ID) contain the terms 'smtp' or 'mail'? (strange I know, but it's made a difference) 4. does a PTR record exist for the mail server's FQDN? 5. does the domain have a valid SPF record?
If all these criteria are met, you really shouldn't have any problems passing go & collecting $200.
Love, Simon W
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