SPF - Sender Policy Framework

The very short version is: You can compare SPF to a power of attorney. It's a proxy you give to various servers, where you say "this server can send emails from me".

But why and how?

In a nutshell, sending emails is done by a server writing a recipient and a sender. Unfortunately, not everyone is completely clean, so people with more shady agendas have figured out that they can send emails from, for example, your email address or from Jyske Bank or from Nets. It's quite simple, because all you really need to do is change the sender address.

To filter out such fake emails, SPF was invented. SPF is a kind of power of attorney. A typical scenario for a Danish webshop is the following:

To keep the wheels turning, some emails need to be sent. There are different types of emails:

• Customer service, trade, etc. - these are the emails that you as a webshop owner write to customers, suppliers or your business partners. This can be done from Outlook or you can use a web-based service like Google Apps.
• Newsletters - you also send out newsletters. But you don't do this from your Outlook email. You typically do this from a program like MailChimp or Ubivox. Here it's Ubivox's servers that send out an email to your potential customers.
• Transactional emails - transactional emails are emails that go out when a transaction takes place. This is the order confirmation when people have completed an order. And the email that goes out when you as a shop owner have sent the order. These emails are sent from Shoporama's server.
• Support inquiries - larger webshops typically have special software to handle customer support. This can be something like Zendesk. This means that when your users get a response in Zendesk, it's Zendesk's servers that send emails in your name.

As you can see above, someone other than you is sending emails in your name. But how do the email systems know that Ubivox and Shoporama are allowed to send emails in your name? They have no way of knowing unless you have SPF set up.

Without going into the technicalities of SPF(you can read about it on our blog here), SPF is a text file that says "This list of servers can send emails in my name". That list resides on your domain, so others can't just create such a list. Therefore, it's a pretty secure way to authorize these emails.

In short, it's just a file that says these servers are allowed to send emails from info@dinwebshop.dk. When Gmail or Hotmail receives an email from info@dinwebshop.dk, they go to yourwebshop.dk and check "is this server authorized to send emails from here?". If it's approved, then there's no problem. If it's not certified, there's a greater risk of it ending up in spam.

That's why...

That's why it's a good idea to spend a few hours setting up your SPF records correctly. Unfortunately, you change providers and software, so when you do, you should remember to update your SPF records.

You can read more about SPF in Danish at Ubivox.

We know online marketing in Shoporama

We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.