Email Deliverability: SPF Records – Part 4

SPF Records – Part 4 – SPF Record Tools

To wrap things up, here are some good online tools for working with and troubleshooting SPF records.

The first one is a DNS lookup tool from ZoneEdit.com. With this tool you simply enter your domain name, and then it shows you what DNS records are currently associated with it. For example, here are the results for EricBrandel.com:

DNS Lookup Results For:
ericbrandel.com
ericbrandel.com. 43200 IN TXT "v=spf1 a/20 -all"
ericbrandel.com. 43200 IN NS ns2.mediatemple.net.
ericbrandel.com. 43200 IN NS ns1.mediatemple.net.
ericbrandel.com. 43200 IN MX 10 mail.ericbrandel.com.
ericbrandel.com. 43200 IN A 205.186.175.192
ericbrandel.com. 43200 IN SOA ns1.mediatemple.net. dnsadmin.mediatemple.net. 2011121303 10800 3600 1209600 43200

The first item is the TXT record that contains the SPF record for this site. As was mentioned earlier, the host for EricBrandel.com, MediaTemple, doesn’t support SPF records. So if you wish to utilize their DNS servers, you have to utilize a TXT record instead. There is no penalty for this, and it’s really just semantics, since a true SPF record still has to contain the v=spf1 starting chunk.

The next one up are the SPF Record Testing Tools. There are three separate tools here. First, is a SPF Record lookup tool. Simply enter your domain name and it will look to see if you have an SPF record published and if you do it will try and validate it.

SPF Record Lookup Tool

The (abridged) results:

The TXT records found for your domain are:
v=spf1 a/20 -all

evaluating...

SPF record passed validation test with pySPF (Python SPF library)!

There is also a separate tool that will check to see if an SPF record is valid:

SPF Record Validator

The results from this tool are slightly confusing. No values are entered for the SPF record to match, so it only processes the ALL mechanism and the action is defined by the – modifier, which causes it to fail.

Input accepted, querying now...
evaluating v=spf1 a/20 -all ...
Results - record processed without error.

Finally, the third tool will test an SPF record against a specific IP address, which is very useful. The fourth field is optional.

SPF Record Tester

The results:

Mail sent from this IP address: 205.186.172.17
Mail from (Sender): foo@ericbrandel.com
Mail checked using this SPF policy: v=spf1 a/20 -all
Results - PASS sender SPF authorized

And that is about it for this topic. If you have any questions, throw them in the comments below, or contact me through the site.

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