Spam and phishing emails are no longer just a minor inconvenience sitting quietly in your junk folder. They are often the first step in phishing attacks, financial fraud, and brand impersonation scams that can harm both individuals and businesses. Every day, attackers attempt to send emails that look legitimate, posing as trusted brands, service providers,…
WooCommerce stores rely heavily on email for everyday operations, from order confirmations and shipping updates to password resets and marketing campaigns. But simply sending an email does not guarantee that it will reach your customer’s inbox. Inbox providers now verify every sender and apply strict filtering rules to protect users from spam and fraud. This…
Incorrect SPF syntax causes legitimate emails to be marked as spam because receiving mail servers strictly parse SPF TXT records, and any syntax or lookup errors (e.g., missing v=spf1, malformed mechanisms, or exceeding the 10 DNS-lookup limit) often yield permerror/temperror/neutral outcomes that many filters score like a fail and that DMARC treats as “no SPF…
The most common causes shown in an SPF record breakdown that lead to SPF failures are syntax/format errors (missing v=spf1, malformed mechanisms, stray characters), exceeding the 10 DNS lookup limit (from include, a, mx, ptr, redirect), misconfigured include or redirect targets, multiple SPF records for a single domain, incorrect or risky mechanism usage (mx/a/ptr/ip4/ip6 order…
If your SendGrid SPF record is missing or misconfigured, recipient servers will treat your messages as unauthenticated, causing SPF failures that break DMARC alignment and materially reduce deliverability through higher spam placement, throttling, and outright rejects—especially at Gmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo—until the record is corrected. Modern email deliverability hinges on a three-part authentication chain—SPF, DKIM,…
Creating an SPF record seems simple as it requires adding the list of servers allowed to send emails on your behalf and publishing it in your DNS. This simplicity is exactly what makes it so vulnerable to misconfiguration. But when you implement SPF, you are not just authorizing senders; you are defining how receiving servers…
Enter your domain (or paste its v=spf1 TXT) into an SPF record tester, run a full syntax + DNS-expansion check against a chosen sending IP and identities (MAIL FROM and HELO), and confirm the tool reports “pass,” ≤10 DNS lookups, no permerror/temperror, a single SPF TXT record, and correct authorization for your providers—then resolve any…
An SPF “pass” means the connecting IP is authorized to send mail for the checked identity (MAIL FROM or HELO) per the domain’s SPF record, a “fail” means the IP is explicitly not authorized by the policy (often via -all or a negatively qualified match), and “neutral” means the domain made no assertion (e.g., ?all)…
Email authentication plays a foundational role in protecting your domain, your brand reputation, and your users from phishing, spoofing, and other malicious activity. Among the core authentication technologies — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is often one of the first layers of defense domain owners implement. However, even after publishing an…
The most common SPF mechanisms are a, mx, ip4, ip6, include, exists, ptr (discouraged), and all, each optionally prefixed by qualifiers + (pass), – (fail), ~ (softfail), or ? (neutral), and the primary modifiers are redirect= and exp=, which respectively delegate evaluation to another domain’s SPF and provide a human-readable failure explanation. SPF (Sender Policy…
