Is Your SPF Quietly Broken?

SPF is one of the three records that prove an email really came from you, and it is also the one that fails most quietly. A record that looks perfectly fine can be silently broken for weeks, and you would not know until your messages start landing in spam or getting rejected outright.

What this short video covers

• What SPF actually does, and why the ending of the record (-all versus ~all) matters
• The ten DNS lookup limit, and how adding everyday services quietly pushes you over it
• Why “too many lookups” turns a passing record into a permerror that breaks authentication
• How a single change by one of your providers can undo your SPF with no warning
• What continuous monitoring catches that a one-off checker misses

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a DNS record that lists the servers allowed to send email for your domain. The catch is the ten DNS lookup limit: every include counts, so your email platform, CRM, marketing tool and help desk all add up. Cross ten and receivers return a permerror, which effectively switches your SPF off. Nothing visibly breaks, which is exactly why most teams only discover it when deliverability drops.

And because providers change their sending infrastructure over time, an SPF record that passed last quarter can fail today, with nothing to tell you. That is why SPF is best treated as something you monitor continuously, not set once and forget.

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