Install an SPF record to improve email delivery

This tip applies to anyone who will be outsourcing any of their outbound email sending from servers other than their corporate email servers. You are likely an IT person who had landed here because someone from the marketing department said ‘Hey IT dude - we started using an ESP and we want to maximize email delivery’. If you are using an Emails Service Provider (ESP) like www.pinpointe.com, Constant Contact or ExactTarget, then this applies. If you are just sending outbound emails from Outlook, then this does not apply.

What is “SPF� and what does it do?
SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework�, and helps to control forged e-mail. SPF is not directly about stopping spam - it is about giving domain owners a way to say which mail sources are legitimate for their domain and which ones aren’t. While not all spam is forged, virtually all forgeries are spam. SPF was created in 2003 to help close loopholes in email delivery systems that allow spammers to “spoof� or steal your email address to send bzillions of emails from another company’s domain (like yours).

SPF is an open standard - it isn’t owned or controlled by any one body or company. More information about SPF can be found at:

>> http://www.openspf.org/Project_Overview
>> http://old.openspf.org

A Specific SPF Example: Setting your SPF Record and Using Pinpointe as an ESP
Many mail servers are now testing for the presence of SPF records so if you don’t have one your email will probably not be delivered to that server. Hotmail for example started testing the use of SPF records in 2004. To set up SPF, your company’s domain administrator publishes an SPF record in your top-level-domain’s DNS record by adding a specific TXT entry. That may sound confusing, but it isn’t - here’s specifically how to do it.

Assume your domain is ‘mycompany.com’. Also assume that you are sending emails from your regular servers, but your marketing department just signed up with Pinpointe to use Pinpointe’s email marketing solution for email marketing. The first step is to go to the OpenSPF wizard, which will walk you through a few basic questions:

>> old.openspf.com/org/wizard.html

Now enter your domain (’mycompany.com’) and hit the ‘Begin’ button. You will get a screen like this:

Just answer each SPF question

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