How to add SPF to the “From” domain in MAX accounts? MAX
In February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo will introduce requirements affecting email deliverability. Authenticate your domain with DKIM and add a DMARC policy. Lastly, ensure your new “From” address is used in all your new, scheduled, or automated emails.
For additional details on these modifications, refer to our blog post: Gmail and Yahoo’s Authentication Changes: All You Need to Know.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) indicates IP addresses authorized to send emails from a specific domain.
You can have an unlimited number of From addresses, and in multiple domains. Each email address can be used multiple times with different names. Each new domain you use with your From addresses needs to be authenticated with DKIM, SPF and DMARC.
Learn how to add a From address to your account.
There are two possible scenarios in GetResponse MAX.
Using your sending domain as your From email address
Authentication is done when you redirect the domain to our nameservers, and there are no extra steps required. You will see the following information next to your “from” address:
Using a different domain as your From email address
You will need to authenticate the domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
Here you can find instructions how to authenticate with DKIM and here how to set a DMARC record.
To add an SPF record to your domain, you need to add the following TXT record to your domain’s DNS:
Record name: yourfromdomain.com
Type: TXT
Value: v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.yoursendingdomain.com -all
As the record name, you should use the From domain for which the SPF is being added.
In the value row, you need to use your sending domain.
For example, if your from domain is myshop.com, and your sending domain is mailing.myshop.com, the record would look like this:
Record name: myshop.com
Type: TXT
Value: v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.mailing.myshop.com -all
Please ensure that you only have a single SPF record for each domain, since having more than one will cause the SPF authentication to fail. If you already have an SPF record, you can merge the values into a single entry. Simply insert:
include:yoursendingdomain.com right before the terminating mechanism in that record.
For example, if your current SPF record looks like this:v=spf1 a -all
update it to:v=spf1 a include:yoursendingdomain.com -all
Troubleshooting the “Too many SPF lookups” error
The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) specification limits the number of DNS lookups to 10. If your SPF record includes too many “include” mechanisms, you risk exceeding the 10-lookup limit.
The solution is to use the “ip4” mechanism instead of “include” to specify IP addresses directly. It does not require DNS lookups and therefore does not count against this limit. Please contact us at support@getresponse-max.com to find out what your assigned IP address is.
This means that instead of providing your sending domain (include:_spf.mailing.myshop.com), you would add the following:
ip4:123.11.1.111
123.11.1.111 is where you would provide your IP address.
Here you can find a useful tool to check if the SPF has been implemented correctly.
