These phishing emails may be sufficiently convincing for your customers to be duped into opening them without realizing it. It's less likely that your genuine emails will reach customers' inboxes because of this, which can harm your brand's reputation and your standing with email providers.

This post aims to explain the comprehensive guide on Sender Policy Framework, but let us first start with a bit of history. 

The Origin of the SPF Sender Policy Framework

We must go back to the early 2000s, when SPF was originally launched, to understand what it is. Authentication called SPF Sender Policy Framework enables mail recipients to check the source domains of email communications. There were a few suggestions for an authenticating email in the early 2000s. Among them were Gordon Fecyk's "Designated Mailer Protocol" (DMP) and Hadmut Danisch's "Reverse MX" (RMX).

Meng Weng Wong, a well-known entrepreneur from Singapore and the founder of Pobox, combined these two suggestions in 2003. Over the course of the following two years, experts and security engineering solicited several changes over SPF. SPF is currently being used by 123,144,861 websites, besides 28,215,796 older SPF-using websites and 1,501,717 websites in India.

Email SPF was acknowledged as an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) experimental standard in 2005. Finally, in 2006, RFC 4408 served as the specification for the publication of SPF (as experimental).

The Current State of Email SPF

Let's move past the past and examine the current situation of SPF. SPF 2.0, the current version in use, is described in RFC 7208 dated 2014. All significant email providers, including Microsoft (Outlook), Google (Gmail), Yahoo Mail, AOL, Hotmail/Outlook Live, and others, now support it.

SPF was initially developed to let email senders specify which servers they may send mail from, hence preventing email spoofing and email phishing.

Since then, the protocol has undergone many changes and is now used in some capacity by almost all widely used email servers. However, many businesses that employ it continue to misunderstand it, which leads to frequent abuse or improper configuration.

Understanding SPF Record

You can specify how your mail server will behave by validating the SPF record, which is a DNS record. Your mail client uses this data to decide whether to display a message with an unknown sender and to prevent messages from being forwarded with the SPF record checker.

How Is SPF Helping You? Blocking Unauthorized Senders

Here is some information about what SPF is doing for your company if you're curious. SPF, also known as the Sender Policy Framework, is one of the oldest and most frequently adopted industry standards for email security. It works on the straightforward premise that only senders who have been authorized should be allowed to send emails from your domain. What occurs when you implement SPF on your domain is:

Disseminate SPF Records

A list of all permitted IP addresses for email sending must be published as SPF entries on your DNS.

Authentication for Email Server

The sender's IP address is compared to the list you gave whenever a receiving email server notices an email from your domain.

The message is authenticated and delivered to the recipient's inbox if the sender's IP matches one on the list. If they don't match, the server rejects the email for failing authentication.

Third-Party Vendor SPF

SPF for your third-party vendors: What is it? You must enter IP addresses or SPF-handling domains specific to your third parties in the domain record of your domain in order to align them for SPF. A word of caution though: avoid using multiple SPF entries for the same domain!

How Are Spam And Spoofing Protected By The Sender Policy Framework?

SPF policy framework comprises an authentication method and a machine-readable language. Each taking part domain discloses characteristics, such as approved senders, that uniquely describe their mail. To establish whether a message is from a trusted source, an SPF client program runs a query looking for the SPF records.

There are seven query outcomes: pass, which shows that the message satisfies the domain's definition of legitimate messages; fail, which shows that the message does not; and additional requirements for mail that don't fit either category, such as messages from domains that don't publish SPF data.

What Distinguishes SPF, DKIM, And DMARC From One Another?

Not all email authentication techniques used to combat spammers employ SPF. SPF collaborates with the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Domain-based Message Authentication (DMARC) protocols to improve email security.

DKIM outlines a protocol for cryptographically assuring ownership of email messages delivered from a domain. DKIM prevents spammers from using that field for emails without authorization.

Using the DMARC plans & techniques, email-sending companies can specify domain-level policies for email authentication and validation. This method makes use of the protocols SPF and DKIM, which define how DMARC services and policies are applied.

Wrapping It Up

Now you know what is SPF. A technique called Sender Policy Framework (SPF) should limit who may use a company's domain as the source of an email message. SPF prevents emails sent from what looks to be a legitimate company from being sent by spammers and other attacks.

In order to give the recipient server thorough information on the legitimacy of an incoming message through DNS, GoDMARC links SPF and DMARC metadata (Domain Name Service). You will list the email servers or IP addresses that can deliver messages on behalf of your company domain once SPF and DMARC pricing plans have been established.