SPF Protection for Email

Posted by Laura Bergells

April 21, 2008

What’s SPF? When you hear “SPF” you might be thinking “Sun Protection Factor”. (Especially now that it’s spring!)

But last week, I set up SPF email protection for two clients.

When it comes to the internet, SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework“.

What’s SPF do?

Basically, it tries to keep you from getting burned by email spoofers!

In a brief, SPF — or Sender Policy Framework — helps to cut down on “From Line” spamming. Its aim is to stop the havoc spammers wreak when they decide to put YOUR email address in the “From Line” of their spam.

Last week, one of my clients started to get swamped with “bounces” and “undelivered” emails. A spammer decided to use his email address in the from line. Aggravating!

Fortunately, my client did not have a catchall account — so we shut down the one, lone email account in question for a day, and asked clients to use an alternate email address that we set up until we resolved the situation.

Next, we set up SPF for his mail server using the open SPF Wizard — to help prevent any further email spoofing. Then, we re-opened his email account.

It’s only been 4 days — but both clients have reported a significant reduction in spam since we implemented SPF email protection.

So far, so good…

But how does SPF perform for the long term?

It didn’t take long to set up the SPF setting — a half hour for two clients.

Was it worth the time?