And, I'm not talking about the Sun Protection Factor that you see on your bottle of sunscreen.

 

I'm referring to SPF which stands for Sender Policy Framework. It is used to reduce the overall amount of spam and more specifically, it works to reduce the chances that your domain is “spoofed” or used by third parties to send fake emails using your domain name. When a spammer or other email abuser sends an email they frequently cover their tracks by faking an email address. If they use your email address, this can impact the reputation of your domain. By implementing SPF at the DNS level, you can dramatically reduce your spam and better protect your domain from becoming victim to spoofers.

 

SPF is a TXT record entered at the DNS level specifying the provider(s) that your company uses to send email through. IE. Infosaic.com, Google.com, etc.

 

There are tools available which will generate this SPF record to add to your DNS like http://www.spfwizard.net.

 

 

 

Let's look at an example to give you an idea of how SPF works. Bob owns the domain example.net. He also sometimes sends mail through his GMail account and contacted GMail's support to identify the correct SPF record for GMail. Since he often receives bounces about messages he didn't send, he decides to publish an SPF record in order to reduce the abuse of his domain in e-mail envelopes:

example.net.  TXT  "v=spf1 mx a:pluto.example.net include:aspmx.googlemail.com -all"

The parts of the SPF record mean the following:

 

 

As long as we use email, there apparently will be some level of spam in our lives; however with the advent of SPF, you have an additional tool to aid in the fight against spam.