You need to generate a valid SPF TXT record to deploy SPF (Sender Policy Framework) for enhanced email authentication and delivery. An SPF record is made up of IP addresses and mail servers allowed to send emails on behalf of your company and syntax (mechanisms, modifiers, and qualifiers).
Large enterprises have multiple domains, departments, and functions requiring frequent to and fro of emails. Therefore, they create multiple SPF records with the intention of better security. However, this creates confusion for recipients’ servers while referring to SPF records due to unaligned information. All this requires more DNS lookups, and within no time, your record exceeds the SPF DNS lookup limit of 10, plunging a Permerror.
SPF compression (also called as SPF flattening) is the process of consolidating multiple records and redundant or unaligned syntaxes that helps eliminate the need for DNS lookups so that your record stays within the maximum lookup limit.
Steps of the SPF Compression Process
Having an erroneous SPF record is equivalent to not having it, or maybe even worse. We at AutoSPF perform step-by-step SPF compression on your domain’s record to help you stay abreast of phishing and spoofing attacks.
Domain Submission
The first step involves studying the submitted domain for its utility, deliverability, and vulnerability.
IP Address Collection
A list of ipv4 and ipv6 IP addresses of all the authorized senders (including third-party email vendors) is created by querying A and AAAA records.
Image sourced from cloudns.net
Compression
We get rid of redundant details and maintain uniformity of instructions across the SPF DNS record. This step also involves merging the content of multiple SPF records into a single one.
Updating and Maintenance
The updated SPF record is added to your domain’s DNS for recipients’ servers to access it for authentication.
Verification
Verification checks are run to ensure that changes are implemented properly, and recipients’ servers are able to retrieve your record without any problem.