A Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record is a DNS record that identifies specific mail servers that are allowed to send an 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 Qmarkets.


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.


Unless you set up a custom SMTP connection, Qmarkets sends emails on your behalf when notifications, reminders and subscription updates are triggered. For the sake of illustration, let's say your mailbox address is innovation@domain.com. When you reply to a customer and the email goes out, the customer'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 innovation@domain.com and the "sender" is Qmarkets. Without an SPF record specifying Qmarkets as an approved sender, it's likely your email will be marked as spam. If there is an SPF record that includes Qmarkets 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 Qmarkets, the TXT record should look something like this in your DNS provider:

For our European customers:

TXT: "v=spf1 include:_spfeu.qmarkets-dns.org ~all"

For our US-based customers:

TXT: "v=spf1 include:_spfusa.qmarkets-dns.org ~all"

 

After you've updated the record with your provider, open a ticket with Qmarkets support mentioning your desired outgoing email address. After a quick verification, your new email will be set. For testing the validity of your SPF record, we'd recommend using an SPF testing tool such as MX Toolbox.