GOV.UK
Guidance
Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
Published 19 February 2016
© Crown copyright 2016
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/email-security-standards/sender-policy-framework-spf
What is SPF?
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) validates the email domain a message was sent from by listing valid sending IP addresses or domains in the DNS record. This lets recipient email services check if an email came from a valid IP or domain and mark it as spam if it didn’t.
SPF records must exist on the sender domain’s DNS record which the recipient email service must check on receipt of an email. The recipient can set rules to process messages accordingly. An example rule would look for messages that fail the SPF check and mark them as spam, or increase the spam score.
This diagram shows how SPF works:
More information
Find detailed information on the SPF specification at openspf.org, For more on how SPF works there is a simple explanation and another good diagram.
