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I am having issues with my SPF records and I am not very familiarized with that. I need to add 2 additionnals SPF records to my current SPF records. At first, I just created 2 others TXT records but it seems it's not correct. I can only have 1 SPF records.

So, i need your help, i need to merge together those 3 SPF records :

v=spf1 +a +mx +ip4:184.170.132.66 +ip4:184.107.73.236 ~all
MS=ms46042964 
v=spf1 a mx include:freshbooks.com -all

The first one is from my hosting provider, the second one is for my Office 365 (my emails are managed with office exchange online) and the third one is for preventing that the invoices sent by freshbooks don't go in the junk of my clients.

Any help is appreciated, thank you very much!

Jean-Philippe

JeePee
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2 Answers2

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First, you probably want to look at a resource like this one: SPF Introduction. Once you've got an understanding of what SPF does and what a valid record looks like, try deleting the other 2 existing records and updating 1, for example:

v=spf1 +a +mx +ip4:184.170.132.66 +ip4:184.107.73.236 MS=ms46042964 include:freshbooks.com ~all

Then use an SPF validation tool to check the record. You're likely going to run into a "Too many DNS lookups" error though, which means you'll need to pare down the record to include only the information you absolutely need. See this post for more insight. And this is a good tool to see exactly where the record is exploding.

Community
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terrorbox
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  • Such a professional and helpful answer. Thanks for also providing the tools. – JeePee Feb 17 '14 at 18:57
  • One question on this: in the original question there is a -all and a ~all (tilde-all) , in the answer there is just ~all. Is that done to make this the least-restrictive of the original options, or is there a way to make 1 lookup tilde-all and one minus-all? – Joeblade Jan 14 '16 at 11:10
  • @Joeblade Your assumption is correct—that was done to use the least-restrictive of the original options. Any mechanism (a, all, ip4, include, etc.) can be prefixed with a modifier (+, -, ~, -, etc.). So you could have a record that has one lookup as "-include" and another as "~include", but you can't have more than one "all" mechanism per record. The "all" mechanism is used to 'catch' all of the other records that aren't defined in other mechanisms in the record. This is a pretty good read if you're interested in more details: http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/86506131503/explaining-spf – terrorbox Jan 14 '16 at 15:26
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A few years late...

But MS=ms46042964 is not part of an SPF, this is a Office 365 validation token, and should not be included in an SPF record, this will cause an error, both for MS doing the validation and performing a SPF test.

Also since you are switching to Office 365, you can remove the SPF from your hosting provider as you will not be using their email hosting. So the only SPF you would need is Office 365's.

Matchstick
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