Update Your SPF

Megan Jackson

How to Update Your SPF

There are many use cases where you may want to create an email connector to send a PDF, CSV, or even a text file after a mobile form has been submitted.
If you plan to use email connectors on the Forms On Fire platform, you will need to create an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record for your domain URL so that emails from our servers do not look like SPAM or SPOOF.

SPF is an email authentication standard that compares the email sender’s actual IP address to a list of IP addresses authorized to send mail from that domain. The IP list is published in the domain’s DNS record. Meaning, there’s a chance if you don’t do this, your emails sent from the platform could end up in the receiver’s SPAM folder. And no one wants that! Sendgrid is the technology behind powering our email connector functionality, and the SPF record must specific sendgrid.net as the properly authorized sender of information on your behalf.

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An SPF record shows other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that SendGrid has your permission to send emails on your behalf. SPF uses the domain value in the Return-Path header for the DNS lookup to determine the permitted senders for the domain. That is what makes sure your emails aren’t considered SPAM.

To make changes to the DNS records for your domain simply sign into the account center where your domain is hosted. Select the domain you want to edit, scroll to the DNS & Zone Files location, click on the edit DNS Zone File, make the changes below, and press save.

If you have an SPF record set for your root domain (i.e. yourdomain.com), you must add:

Include:sengrid.net

before all mechanisms of this record. If you do not have an SFP record for your domain, don’t panic! Just create a TXT record with the value:

V=spf1 include:sendgrid.net ~all

Do not create more than one SPF1 record for a given domain. If you need more than one SPF record, you will want to merge the additional SPF records into a single SPF record.

You cannot have more than 10 DNS lookups in your PSF records.
Already have an SPF record for your domain? No problem! You just need to add the SendGrid include mechanism lookup into your existing record.

For example, if your record looks like this:

v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.google.com include:spf.protection.outlook.com ~all

You would just need to add the SPF lookup at the end of the string, right before the

~ all
Mechanism, like so:

v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.google.com include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:sendgrid.net ~all

If you have any questions about how to change or update your SPF, please contact our customer support team at +1 425-214-1920 ext. 2 or email at support@formsonfire.com.