Do I Really Need an SPF Record? 5 Risks of Not Having One
Published in
Glossary
•
Jun 7, 2025
Sending cold sales emails? Setting up an SPF record is critical!
Without SPF for your emails, your domain and your business are wide open to trouble.
If you’re wondering, “Do I really need an SPF record?” we’ve got five reasons why you do below.
What Happens If You Don't Have an SPF Record?
Here are five risks of not having an SPF record set up for your domain:
1. Anyone can pretend to be you 🎭
Not setting up SPF allows cybercriminals to pretend to be sending from your domain.
They can forge the sender's address and pretend to be you.
This lets them launch phishing attacks and scams - all under your trusted (domain) name.
An SPF record allows you to specify what email servers can send on your domain’s behalf. If these scammers use a server that is not in your SPF record, their emails will fail authentication.
This makes impersonating you or your domain a lot harder.
2. Damaged domain reputation 📉
The spoofed emails scammers send are more likely to get flagged as spam by recipients.
Yes… even if you weren’t the one sending them.
This considerably hurts your sender reputation.
Setting up SPF helps protect your domain from this unnecessary damage.
3. Lower email deliverability 📪
Even if your domain still has a decent reputation, not having an SPF record set up will make it deteriorate quickly.
Email service providers will check your domain for an SPF record. If there’s none, they will send you to the spam folder, at best.
Some providers may even reject your email outright in certain cases.
SPF makes email more secure. If your domain does not have this security protocol set up, ESPs must protect recipients from your emails.
4. Blacklisting 📛
Without SPF, you leave your domain wide open for cybercriminals to abuse it.
If scammers have free reign to send emails from your domain, your domain’s malicious emails will get through to recipients.
When email service providers see these malicious emails, they assume they’re coming from your domain.
In other words, your domain is the bad guy, even if you had nothing to do with the emails.
If you don’t stop this on time and set up an SPF record, this will lead to:
📛 Blacklisting of your domain on major spam databases
❌ Blocked or filtered emails - even your legitimate ones
💥 Severe damage to brand trust and email deliverability
In short, not setting up SPF is like leaving the keys to your house on the front porch. Anyone can walk in and cause damage you’ll have to deal with later.
5. Lost business opportunities 💸
Just imagine what could happen if you don’t set up SPF.
If your sales emails land in spam or are not delivered at all, how will you convert them into meetings or sales?
You won’t.
Your entire email outreach strategy will fall flat. No opens. No replies. No deals.
Time to set up an SPF record!
What Is an SPF Record Anyway?
An SPF record tells the world, “Only these servers can send emails from my domain.”
You can add the authorized servers to your domain’s SPF record.
Incoming emails can only pass SPF authentication if the server they were sent with appears in the domain’s SPF record.
Here’s an overview of what happens when an email fails SPF authentication:
Incoming email servers detect an email coming from yourdomain.com
The email was sent by Office 365 servers.
However, yourdomain.com’s SPF record only authorizes Google’s mail servers
The email will fail authentication
Depending on the SPF policy, server configuration, and DMARC settings, the email may now get delivered normally (but flagged as suspicious), land in spam, or be blocked entirely
OK, but what does an SPF record look like?
Here’s an example of an SPF record:
v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:mailgun.org ~all
In this case, Google and Mailgun's servers can send emails from the domain since both services' mail servers are in the record's include tags.
If an email server is an IP number instead of a domain, you use the ip4 or ip4 tag, depending on the type of IP number.
Let’s go back to the beginning of the SPF record. The v=spf1 thingy defines the SPF version. Since only one version is in use, this is always v=spf1.
And jumping to the end of the SPF record we find the all tag, which determines the SPF record’s policy.
In this case, it’s set to soft fail (~all) which marks emails that fail authentication as suspicious but does let them through. This is a good setting to test your SPF record. You don’t want to be blocking emails at this stage.
Once your record works correctly, you can apply the hard fail setting: -all. It tells servers to block emails that fail authentication or send them to the spam folder.
The all tag policy settings are suggestions. What happens to emails from unauthorized servers also depends on server configuration and DMARC record settings.
Beyond SPF
When it comes to maximizing email security, and thus inbox placement, SPF isn’t the full solution.
Rather, SPF is part of a trio of email authentication protocols.
Together, they offer maximum email security.
The other two are DKIM and DMARC.
DKIM makes it hard for cyber criminals to modify emails during transit, and DMARC lets you decide what to do with emails that fail authentication.
To maximize your chances of sales outreach success, you need all three!