How to make a proper SPF record(s) for a complex setup

bindspf

I have a setup with several mailing domains and one domain for the return-path and sender

So the mail header looks like:

Received: from x1.mailer1.com  ( can be x1.mailer2.com, x1.mailer3.com, x1.mailer4.com ) 

Sender name#companydomain.com@bounce.bouncedomain.com
Return-Path: <x@bounce.bouncedomain.com>

Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: a.y.z.a is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of test@bounce.bouncedomain.com)

Here are my SPF Records:

SPF Record for bouncedomain.com

"v=spf1 a a:bouncedomain.net a:bouncedomain.com include:bouncedomain.com ~all"

SPF record for mailer1.com:

v=spf1 a mx ptr mx:mail.mailer1.com -all

Questions, should this work. Do I need an SPF record published for mailer1.com?

Best Answer

You should have SPF records for each of your sending domains. It looks like you're creating a record for the receiving domain(s), which is not necessary.

Related Solutions

SPF Softfail – Fix Forwarded Emails to Gmail

Your server host.tariffplansindia.com is receiving a mail from outside, in this case bhasker1@hotmail.com. The receiver on your host is contactus@indianworkingwoman.org. Now your server relays that mail (without changing the envelope From-address) to gmail. The gmail server now gets a mail from your server host.tariffplansindia.com with envelope-From bhasker1@hotmail.com. Now the SPF-Record of hotmail.com forbids all senders except its own, and you can't do anything about that. SPF breaks this kind of mail-forwarding, that's a known issue, but it's also solved by Sender Rewriting Scheme (SRS) from Open SPF.

Using SRS, the relaying mailserver can rewrite the envelope-From so that it comes from a domain you control the SPF record for (host.tariffplansindia.com). Unfortunately, setting up SRS on a mailserver requires - in most cases - compiling and installing software by hand, there is only a very limited variety of available implementations and also an existing question of how to perform SRS on postfix.

SPF result is “neutral”

You have 2 options, depending on if you want people to see @myserver.com only or see that and @server2.mywebsite.com

if you want people to see 2 separate @domain.names then you will need 2 separate SPF records as Jacob Evans has pointed out, one for each domain.

More likely though, if you want multiple servers using the same @domain.name you will want to configure the mail transport agent (MTA) such as postfix, or exim to use a different domain than their own hostname for outbound email. In postfix this setting is called myorigin as described on the postfix site. You can set this parameter by running the command

postconf myorigin=domain.name

If using multiple servers with different public IP addresses you will need an SPF record to reflect that, such as what you have with the a and ip4 mechanisms

v=spf1 a ip4:138.xxx.xxx.148 -all
       ^  ^
   Indicates 2 servers

Best Answer

Related Solutions

SPF Softfail – Fix Forwarded Emails to Gmail

SPF result is “neutral”

Related Topic