A carefully tailored SPF record will reduce the likelihood of your domain name getting fraudulently spoofed and keep your messages from getting flagged as spam before they reach your recipients. Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address; something that is simple to do because many mail servers do not perform authentication. Spam and phishing emails typically use such spoofing to mislead the recipient about the origin of the message.
What are the benefits of adding an SPF record?
The reason you should set up an SPF record is that it tells mail servers and SPAM controllers that you have approved one or more servers to send e-mails on your behalf. When our Elina server sends e-mails from your domain, for example, "bookings@yoururl.com", mail servers around the world will wonder whether the Elina server is "allowed" to send this e-mail or if this is some unauthorised SPAM server of which we are all too familiar.
The SPF Record will reduce the number of legitimate e-mail messages that are flagged as spam or bounced back by your recipients' mail servers. The SPF record is not 100% effective, unfortunately, because not all mail providers check for it. Many do, however, so you should notice a significant decrease in the number of bounce-backs you receive.
In order to allow your Elina system to send out emails for you, you must include it in your SPF record.
If you do not have any other systems including your email sending your emails sending you emails on your behalf your SPF record should be like this:
v=spf1 mx a:spf.elinapms.com ~all
Assuming you have other servers sending emails from your domain in addition to the server those must be included in your SPF record. Below is an example of what this would look like if you are using Google mail to send emails from your domain.
v=spf1 mx include:_spf.google.com a:spf.elinapms.com ~all
