Creating and maintaining SPF records is critical for any domain owner or administrator. An SPF record includes all the IP addresses and mail servers that a company trusts and allows to be used to send email messages on its behalf. The existence of a valid and well-maintained SPF TXT record ensures no phishing, spoofing and spam attacks planned in the name of your business are successful.
You can instruct recipients’ SMTP servers or mailboxes to either mark fraudulent emails as spam (you’ll have to use the ~all tag in your SPF record) or completely reject their entry (you’ll have to use the -all tag).
Now, an SPF record consists of multiple elements, and their incorrect usage can cause a permanent error (referred to as SPF permerror as per RFC). So, using the popular and widely trusted Kitterman SPF tool, you can get your TXT records diagnosed to know about all the issues. It’s important to fix these problems immediately; otherwise, hackers can take advantage of unsecured email systems belonging to reputed companies.
Image sourced from datto.com
What Does Kitterman SPF Do?
Kitterman SPF is one of the diagnostic tools that evaluate SPF records against the following and instantaneously points out mistakes-
- No SPF record published on your domain’s DNS.
- Multiple SPF records published for a single domain.
- Use of ptr mechanism.
- Use of mx mechanism.
- Use of unnecessary ‘include’ statements.
- SPF record exceeding the maximum DNS lookup limit of 10.
- SPF record exceeding the maximum void lookup limit of 2.
- Typos, extra spaces, and dashes.
- Inclusion of an invalid sender IP address or mail server.
- Syntax error- incorrect use of mechanisms, qualifiers, and modifiers.
Kitterman SPF record checking tool also retrieves information on the %d macros for the queried domain name or server to examine the results for verifying the status of the published SPF DNS record.
Who is Scott Kitterman?
Scott Kitterman is one of the moderators of the team that built the tool. He looks after the list of DNS providers supporting SPF records. Scott Kitterman created this SPF record checker in accordance with the pyspf library for email message validation.
How To Use Kitterman SPF?
It’s a straightforward and quick process. Just follow these steps-
- Click on this link, and enter the domain name whose SPF record you want to check.
- Click the ‘Get SPF Record (if any)’ button.
- Wait for just a few seconds, and you’ll see all the mistakes in your SPF TXT record.
Also, if you have just created your SPF record and want to test it for errors before publishing it on your domain’s DNS, then you need to paste the generated record string. Entering the domain name won’t work, as it only works for records that are already updated on the DNS.