The system that manages Internet email,
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
(SMTP), originally defined no mechanism for authenticating a message.
Without such mitigations, email servers and user agents must trust that a message originated from the domain claimed in the message's
From header. A design decision of an older, more trusting Internet, this is exploited by those sending spam other and fraudulent messages (e.g.,
phishing attempts) to hide the true source of a message by forging the sending address.
Reaching wide deployment in 2009,
Sender Policy Framework
(SPF) is one method of detecting such forged email messages.
An SPF record in your DNS entry is one way a mail server can filter out fraudulent messages claiming to be from your domain. Having an SPF record improves your domain's overall credibility and improves deliverability as most mail servers assign a higher spam risk score to messages sent by domains lacking such a record.
Many organizations fail to configure an SPF record correctly and do not benefit from the increased reliability they would achieve with a small configuration change. Because messages determined to be spam can be silently discarded, this often goes unnoticed.
DomainProactive verifies that your domain has an SPF record and will notify you if a change has been made which disables SPF. This is valuable for ensuring that you do not encounter email deliverability problems due to misconfiguration.