SPF
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a mechanism designed to reduce forged email. SPF is increasingly used by mail providers to filter mail, so it is important to enable SPF for your domain in order to ensure that mail that you send is delivered.
Simple SPF
If your domain is hosted with Mythic Beasts, enabling SPF is very simple:
- Go to the My Domains section of the Customer Control Panel.
- Select your domain.
- Follow the SPF link in the Nameservers and DNS.
- Press the Use Mythic Beasts SPF button.
Custom SPF
If DNS for your domain is not hosted with Mythic Beasts, or you send outgoing mail via mail servers other than our own, then you will need to configure SPF manually.
We publish an SPF record which you can use if your outgoing mail is sent via our mailhubs, at _spf.mythic-beasts.com.
You should use the SPF include: mechanism to reference this record from
your own SPF record. Normally your SPF record will need to go at the root of
your domain, which is named as @ in the DNS. So your overall SPF
record might look like this:
@ TXT "v=spf1 include:_spf.mythic-beasts.com -all"
Be aware that with this record in place, receiving servers are expected to reject mail that purports to come from your domain but is not sent by our mailhubs. You should be sure that this is the case before using this SPF record. Two particular things to think about are websites that may may legitimately send mail using your domain name, and redirections.
If you need a more complicated SPF record, please feel free to email us for help. The ultimate reference is the SPF standards track RFC.
Note that this record ends with -all, which indicates a fail. If you are
publishing an SPF record for the first time, you might prefer to replace -all
with ~all which is the less drastic softfail. Unfortunately it can be
hard to evaluate the impact of SPF records, since their effect takes place at
the receiving end.
Note that you should use a TXT record. There was once an SPF record type, but (for complicated and controversial reasons) this is now deprecated, and is no longer supported by our control panel.