As of August 13, 2024, the United States is the world’s largest sender of spam emails, with as many as 8 billion of them sent daily. China and Germany are closely following, with 7.6 billion and 7.3 billion, respectively. Email-based phishing, spoofing, and BEC attacks are taking over the world. As per the IC3 Internet Crime Report 2023, the most frequently reported crime in 2023 was phishing schemes, accounting for nearly 34% of all complaints reported.
Because of such alarming and perturbing statistics surfacing over the internet every day, all major email service providers have become stricter about filtering legitimate and illegitimate emails. While this works in favor when you receive emails, the scenario isn’t that forgiving for outgoing emails, especially if you don’t have email authentication protocols in place.
Email authentication protocols are deployed at the sender’s end to prevent their domain from getting misused in phishing and spoofing attacks. These protocols are based on technologies that help the receiving server verify whether an email claiming to come from your domain is actually sent by an authorized sender. There are three primary email authentication protocols, namely- SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. For this particular article, we are bringing SPF to the center stage to help you understand how it works in favor of your email marketing campaigns and what soft fail and hard fail mean in SPF’s context.
What is SPF and what is its role in email marketing?
SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework. It’s the oldest of the three primary email authentication protocols currently in use. The purpose of SPF is to empower the domain owner to clearly specify which all IP addresses and mail servers (belonging to them, their employees, third-party vendors, etc.) they trust and officially authorize to be used for sending emails on behalf of their brand. Any outgoing email sent from an IP address or mail server outside of the specified ones is categorized as potentially malicious by the receiving server.
You deploy SPF by generating an SPF record for your domain. This SPF record contains mechanisms, qualifiers, and modifiers that help you instruct receiving servers how to handle unauthorized emails sent illegitimately from your domain. Using mechanisms and qualifiers, you can subject unauthorized emails to soft fail or hard fail. We will explain soft fail and hard fail in detail in the later part of the article.
With SPF in place, different receiving servers consider your domain as trusted and legitimate, improving your sender’s reputation. With a good sender’s reputation, a maximum of your outgoing emails pass the security filters and land in the inboxes of the intended recipients. Apart from being beneficial to email campaigns, SPF also ensures that if a threat actor compromises your email infrastructure and sends phishing emails from your domain, then such messages don’t get placed in recipients’ inboxes.
Why does a good sender’s reputation matter for email marketing?
Why does any company plan and develop an email marketing campaign in the first place? It’s usually to reach the maximum clients, customers, and prospects regularly and remind them of your products and services. Businesses also send emails for items left in their carts or products and services recently viewed by them. No matter in what way you strategize, the usual aim is to sell your products or services, request to enroll, build and maintain relationships, impart information, etc.
You can expect a marketing email to meet the end goal only if the intended recipient engages with it. If you don’t have SPF in place, receiving mailboxes will question your domain’s integrity, causing many of your emails to get wrangled over security filters.
But with an impressive sender’s reputation, you win the trust of various receiving servers, helping most of your outgoing emails pass the security filters and get placed in the inboxes. The more number of emails land in inboxes (and not spam or junk folders), the higher the possibility of recipients engaging with them. This way, you can expect more people to take the ultimate action you desire— for example, making a purchase or leaving star ratings.
Types of ‘fail’ in SPF
As mentioned above, you, as a domain owner, can mention in your SPF record how exactly you want the receiving servers to handle illegitimate emails sent from your domain. There are two options that you can choose from-
SPF soft fail
SPF soft fail is indicated by the ‘~all’ mechanism. If you set this mechanism in your SPF record, then it means you are instructing the receiving mailbox to mark unauthorized emails sent from your domain as spam. This way, potentially fraudulent emails stay away from the inboxes, minimizing the possibility of targets opening and interacting with them; this ultimately brings down the chances of successful phishing and spoofing attacks attempted using your reputed business name.
SPF hard fail
SPF hard fail is indicated by the ‘-all’ mechanism. By configuring your SPF record on hard fail, you can instruct receiving servers to reject the entry of unauthorized emails sent from your domain.
In this case, malicious emails sent by compromising your domain don’t get any place in the mailboxes at all, and your brand stays out of phishing and spoofing news.
Final words
SPF soft fail is a more forgiving approach compared to SPF hard fail. While SPF verification isn’t foolproof, it can occasionally misidentify legitimate emails as spam. If your business can’t afford to miss important emails due to false positives, soft fail is a safer choice. With soft fail, emails that fail SPF checks are still delivered to the recipient’s inbox, albeit with a warning.
If your operations are sensitive to false positives, hard fail could negatively impact your email deliverability and customer experience. SPF enhances email security in campaigns by verifying sender authenticity, reducing the risk of spoofing and improving deliverability.
To optimize your SPF configuration and improve your sender reputation, contact us.
