What is SPF and How to set SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record ?

[Dipak Bhoi]

Hello guys,

When sending an email to one of my client I am receiving bounce back email with following statement.

Message rejected by Google Groups. Please visit http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188131 to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines.

&

Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: xxx.xxx.xxx.xx is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of mailaccount@domain.com) client-ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xx;

What is SPF ?
Sender Policy Framework is a record that is used to help prevent email spoofing. It allows you to specify all of the IP addresses that you would send mail from in one simple TXT record, and to tell the receiving server to only allow the outbound servers you listed.

We suggest that you create a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record for your domain.
The purpose of an SPF record is to prevent spammers from sending messages, Recipients can refer to the SPF record to determine whether a message from your domain comes from an authorized mail server.

For example, suppose that your domain example.com uses Gmail. You create an SPF record that identifies the Google Apps mail servers as the authorized mail servers for your domain. When a recipient's mail server receives a message from user@example.com, it can check the SPF record for example.com to determine whether it is a valid message. If the message comes from a server other than the Google Apps mail servers listed in the SPF record, the recipient's mail server can reject it as spam.

How to set SPF ?

Mechanism

Mechanisms can be prefixed with one of four qualifiers:

"+"   Pass
"-"   Fail
"~"   SoftFail
"?"   Neutral

Examples:

"v=spf1 mx -all"

Allow domain's MXes to send mail for the domain, prohibit all others.
"v=spf1 -all"

The domain sends no mail at all.
"v=spf1 +all"

The domain owner thinks that SPF is useless and/or doesn't care.

OR you can find more information by visiting the following link.

http://www.openspf.org/SPF_Record_Syntax

To check your SPF is valid or not you can check with link http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html.