mailboxes dmarcian Tools

SPF Management Challenges

The email world was a much different place back in 1997 when the idea of SPF was taking shape. It went mostly unnoticed when first publicly mentioned around 2000, but fast-forward 20 years, and it is now one of the most widespread forms of email authentication in use, along with DKIM and DMARC. Ensuring the…
John Bowers
23 March 2020

Why SPF is so funky in today’s modern world

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) has been around for a long time and enjoys a rich history reaching back to 1997, with the SPF Project itself starting in June 2003. (a timeline history of SPF can be found here). However, there are some challenges with SPF's feedback and it is often misunderstood. We take a look at these…
Vaughn Talbert
21 March 2019

The History of SPF

Dec 14, 1997 Jim Miller sends Paul Vixie an email with his idea on verifying SMTP MAIL FROM address from means of outbound-smtp MX dns records. Note: This event and the date are not confirmed by public records and are based solely on information provided by Paul Vixie. Mar 27, 2000 – Public mention of the idea to create 'MS'…
Vaughn Talbert
18 March 2019
Deployment

Too many DNS lookups?

People sometimes run into the "too many DNS lookups" error when rolling out and managing SPF. It doesn't help that there is a lot of bad guidance on the Internet. This article describes how to fix this issue. (more…)
dmarcian
4 August 2016
dmarcian Tools

SPF-Identified Servers – How and Why

To turn DMARC into something useful to people, dmarcian processes DMARC data using a big pile of rules.  These rules identify sources of email, and dmarcian presents users with DMARC compliance information based on email source. One identified source of email is called "SPF-Identified Servers", and dmarcian users are often curious as to how data ends up in…
dmarcian
5 April 2016