Leave room under the SPF lookup limit
Why it matters
The SPF record is close to the limit of 10 DNS lookups, so adding one more mail service would break SPF for every sender. Trimming now avoids a surprise later.
Staged change. Do this in stages and check each one before the next, so a mistake does not break your site or your mail.
The fix
- Remove includes for services you no longer use and a, mx or ptr terms nothing needs.
- Before adding a new mail service, plan to give it a sending subdomain with its own SPF record instead of another include on the main domain.
- Do not hand-copy providers' IP ranges into the record to save lookups; they change and the copy goes stale.
Related
- Reported by the SPF record check
- Publish an SPF record
- Merge the SPF records into one
- Fix the syntax error in the SPF record
- Replace +all in the SPF record with ~all
- Narrow the very large address range in the SPF record
- Change ?all in the SPF record to ~all
- Choose the right SPF ending for this domain
- End the SPF record with ~all or -all
- Bring the SPF record under 10 DNS lookups
- Remove SPF terms that point at names that no longer exist
- Fix the SPF include that has no SPF record
- Break the loop in the SPF includes
- Replace the include that has several SPF records
- Replace the ptr mechanism in the SPF record
- Check the SPF terms that use macros
- Re-run the scan if part of the SPF record could not be read
Scan your domain to see whether this applies to you.