What are they?
SPF Records are essentially a list of authorised servers who are permitted to send email on your behalf. The SPF record lives as a text file in your domain's DNS Zone, and can only be published by you.
When preparing your site for Go Live, your IT department will need to add Commerce Vision's IP address to your SPF record.
Why do you need one?
The Sender Policy Framework is a tool in the fight against spam. Mail-receiving servers will check messages to ensure that the sender's name matches their IP address. If it doesn't, the message is marked as junk or caught in a spam filter. The exception to this is messages sent from IP addresses or host names that are listed in the SPF record.
Web-generated emails sent by CSS (such as Order Confirmations or Contact Us forms) can get caught in spam filters or marked as junk by an ISP if they appear to be from your domain.
The ISP can read your domain's SPF record to determine whether you have authorised our ISP to send these emails.
For example, when your customer places an order online, the website will trigger an Order Confirmation email to the user. This email is sent by our CSS website, but might have a "from" address of "orders@yourwebsite.com".
This is where the Sender Policy Framework comes in. Before your site goes live, you'll need to add Commerce Vision's IP address to your SPF record. This will ensure that web-generated emails (related to orders or online enquiries, for instance) get to their intended recipients.
Want to learn more?
Check out the official Sender Policy Framework project's site - http://www.openspf.org/Introduction.
