Saturday, November 5, 2016

Exchange Best Practices: SPF Records

HI Everyone ,
Hope it will help you !!!

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) allows email administrators to reduce sender-address forgery (spoofing) by specifying which are allowed to send email for a domain. SPF is configured by adding a specially formatted TXT record to the DNS zone for the domain.
You can read a detailed explanation of how SPF works here.

It is recommended to implement SPF for your domains. Although adding SPF records to your domain does not directly help to prevent spam from being received by your organization, it does help other organizations to prevent spam email that is spoofing your domain. This in turn can help maintain the reputation of your email domain, and reduce the likelihood of your organization’s legitimate emails being rejected by other email systems, and can help reduce NDRs or bounce back messages from other email systems when spammers are spoofing your domain.

Email spam continues to be a huge problem for organizations these days, and it usually falls on the Exchange administrator to do something about it. Aside from the usual anti-spam measures we can put in place to protect our own servers from spam, we also need to consider how to prevent spammers from spoofing (imitating) the domain names for our own organization. After all, it can be very embarrassing or cause serious brand damage to have spam and malware that uses your domain name.


To detect spoofed email many receiving servers, particularly those operated by large email providers such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and AOL, will perform a check of the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record for the sender’s domain when a sending server is attempting to send an email message.
SPF records allow a domain owner to specify which mail servers are permitted to send email for that domain name. When the sending server issues its “MAIL FROM” command in the SMTP conversation, the receiving server will look up the SPF record in the domain name of the MAIL FROM email address to see if there is a match for the source IP address of the SMTP connection.

However, SPF is not always able to simply be turned on. A misconfigured SPF record can cause legitimate emails from your domain to be rejected by other email systems. So it is recommended to proceed with caution, taking care to audit all of the possible legitimate senders of email for your domain (including your Exchange/Exchange Online system, plus any external hosted systems that send email using your domain, such as email marketing or payroll systems).

An SPF record is simply a TXT record with a certain syntax. The syntax is made up of two parts; mechanisms, and modifiers. Modifiers are optional and are not commonly used except for special circumstances. During management and troubleshooting of transport you’ll most often be dealing with SPF records containing only mechanisms.

The resulting SPF record looks like this.
v=spf1 a mx include:helpscoutemail.com ~all

By adding that string as a TXT record in the public DNS zone for the domain name I will have prevented unauthorized email servers from spoofing my domain name. At least, they won’t be able to do it when sending to any receiving server that checks SPF records. Anyone who is not checking SPF records can still receive the spoofed email, but may reject it for other reasons such as spam content or malware.




After you have your SPF record in place you should validate it. And in fact, you should repeat this validation test any time you suspect an external organization may be rejecting your email because of your SPF record. MXToolbox has an SPF record validator that takes a domain name and IP address as input and lets you know what the result will be if that IP address sends email for your domain.



Source :- Exchangeserverpro.com

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