When a SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record is added to the DNS for your registered domain name, it identifies which mail servers are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain. This article will help you understand why these records are important, and why you should create a record for Guestfolio.

Why are SPF records important?

SPF records prevent spammers from sending messages with bogus From: addresses attached to your domain. This stuff gets fairly technical, but let's keep it simple for now.

Have you ever received one of those nonsense emails that looks like it's from PayPal, but is actually from a spammer posing as PayPal? This is called a "spoof" email, because it's quite easy to fake the domain associated with an email (like PayPal in this case). SPF was created to combat these sorts of fake sender issues.

Guestfolio sends emails on your behalf when you reply to a customer. For the sake of illustration, let's say your mailbox address is hotel@domain.com. When you send an email to a guest and the email goes out, the guest's server will ask the following questions:

• Who sent this email?
• Does the sender have permission to send on behalf of this domain?

In our example, the "who" is hotel@domain.com and the sender is Guestfolio. Without an SPF record specifying Guestfolio as an approved sender, it is likely your email will be marked as spam. If there is an SPF record that includes Guestfolio as an approved sender, then it's virtually guaranteed to skip the spam filter. That's why this is so important!

What the record looks like

SPF records are added to your domain's DNS as a TXT record. To authorize emails sent by Guestfolio, the record should look something like this:

v=spf1 a mx include:email2.guestfolio.net ~all

If you already have an existing SPF record, you can update the record to include Guestfolio's mail servers:

include:email2.guestfolio.net