Updating your SPF record

As part of our IRM Newsroom product, we send out over 300,000 emails per month on behalf of our clients. As a default, these emails are set to be sent from news@irmau.com.

But we understand that you would often prefer if your email communication came from an email address with your business domain. That's great! The difficulty comes, however, when spam filters flag emails that look like they come from one place but are actually sent from another.

Luckily, there is a way to whitelist our mail server, so it's safe to send on behalf of your business domain.

What is SPF?

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication standard that compares the email sender’s actual IP address to a list of IP addresses authorised to send mail from that domain. The IP list is published in the domain’s DNS record.

Why is an SPF record important?

If you are sending mail from a domain but using a different mail server you will want to include an SPF record in your DNS settings to ensure the highest rate of deliverability.

What do I need to do?

What you need to do may depend on the following scenarios:

I already have an existing SPF record and need to add to it.

If you already have an SPF record set for your root domain, you must add the following to that existing record:


Before the ~all mechanism of the existing record.

I need to create a new SPF record from scratch.

If you do not have an SPF record for your domain you must create a TXT record with the value:

v=spf1 include:sendgrid.net ~all

Do not create more than one SPF1 record for a given domain.

If you need more than one SPF record, you will want to merge the additional SPF records into a single SPF record.