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I have a domain (fiestyturtles.com) registered at namecheap.com, and hosted at a shared webhost (hostpc.com). But I've moved the email handling of my domain to google apps, I think I set this up by changing the MX records at the domain setup at my webhost to modify the records, there.

It's recently come to my attention that some users who are sending emails from their fiestyturtles.com address have had the delivery rejected like this:

550 Sender Authorization check failed - psmtp

which I think I have tracked down to this "SPF" thing. I have to say I'm rather unfamiliar with it, but I think I understand what's going on - because the domain settings I think have an SPF record that is pointing to my web host's server whereas the email is coming from Google's servers.

Ultimately, my current SPF record is like this, at my webhost:

fiestyturtles.com. TXT "v=spf1 a mx ip4:67.231.248.250 ~all"

From this google page, it sounds like if I want to allow google apps to be allowed, I should have this:

v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all

My question is, do I create an additional TXT SPF record with the google address, so I would have two records? Or do I integrate the google address somehow into what I already have there? Or, so I just replace what I have with just the google one? Or, I've considered getting rid of it altogether since it seems to be kind of a mixed bag on usefulness and is causing potential problems. I think the correct solution in my mind would be to reference both servers, but I'm not sure how the syntax of that should work.

Esa Jokinen
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Peter Tirrell
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1 Answers1

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Just add the include statement that Google is recommending:

v=spf1 a mx ip4:67.231.248.250 include:_spf.google.com ~all

Do not create multiple SPF records.

Paul
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  • Perfect, thanks! I ended up having to mess around with different ways of entered that into my host; it kept removing spaces in the text string. I finally had to escape each space "\" for it to work. – Peter Tirrell Mar 17 '15 at 02:10