I recently noticed I was having new email deliverability issues. It surprised me since things had been going well since switching to AuthSMTP for our outgoing mail. The first thing I checked was my SPF record. It looked like this:
At first glance everything seems okay. Basically it says to include all A records, MX records, and to include the SPF records provided by Google Apps, AuthSMTP and Salesforce. Since that covers every legitimate sender, I finish it off with the -all which indicates a hard fail. Ok, so the syntax is good. You can’t tell that anything is wrong without digging a little deeper. When you actually try to evaluate it you’ll get this error message:
Results – PermError SPF Permanent Error: Too many DNS lookups
After a little research I found out that you are only allowed 10 DNS lookups and fetching the TXT and SPF records count toward that total. That means after you add in the A and MX lookups, we’re at 7 before we even look inside the includes. Let’s pull up the SPF record for Google Apps:
That redirect counts as another DNS lookup. That puts me up to 8 DNS lookups. Thankfully the Salesforce SPF record is nice and clean:
That leaves AuthSMTP:
Ouch! That’s 4 more lookups and the worst part of it is that spf-d.authsmtp.com doesn’t even do anything!
The first thing I did was take out the MX lookup since it’s redundant. I also replaced aspmx.googlemail.com with _spf.google.com which is what it redirects to anyway. Technically, this isn’t a good idea since Google could change it on me — but remember I don’t have a lot of options here. I’m just happy to see my revised record pass the test:
I also sent an email to the AuthSMTP team. They responded within 30 minutes saying that they would remove the extra DNS record and look at how they can clean things up.
I learned something tonight. Remember to count the DNS lookups in your SPF record. It turns out they can add up faster than points on a teenagers drivers license. And if you’re using a lot of includes like I am, remember to do periodic checks to make sure nothing has changed.
Resources:
- I wrote about Sending email through Gmail over a year ago. While I absolutely don’t recommend you try this anymore, it has some useful information on SPF records and email deliverability in general.
- Kitterman have a great tool to help validate your SPF records.
Thank you for the help. I had the exactly the same problem, I just replaced a few a: references to ip4: references.
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Thanks! Your post was helpful, and helped me to resolve some of my SPF record issues.