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You already know you need SPF to have a better chance of landing in your prospect’s inbox.
You also know you must add the SPF record to your domain provider account, in this case, Gandi.
However, you may not know how to add the SPF record to your domain.
We’re changing that today. After reading this post, you’ll know exactly how to set up an SPF record on Gandi’s DNS management system.
⚠️ Before continuing, ensure your domain uses Gandi's DNS servers. If your domain’s name servers are pointed away from Gandi, for example, to your hosting company, then that’s where you have to manage your DNS records.
After saving your record, it won’t be active immediately.
In the worst-case scenario, it can take up to three days for your record to propagate fully.
However, in most cases, your record will be ready in a few hours.
You can use Mailivery’s DNS Status meter to see if your record is good to go:
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When your SPF record is ready, the status indicator will turn green.
The syntax of an SPF record must be perfect. A single additional space or other typo renders your record useless.
Check your record’s syntax by using Mailivery’s free SPF syntax checker below:
Sender Policy Framework lets you decide what email servers can send from your domain.
In your domain’s SPF record, you can define exactly the tools and services you allow to send on your domain’s behalf.
For example:
If you use Google Workspace’s email infrastructure to send cold emails, you’ll add their servers to your SPF record.
If you also use an email marketing platform like Mailchimp or SendGrid to send newsletters, you’ll need to include their servers in your SPF record, too.
In other words, instead of having multiple SPF records, which would cause complications during authentication, you add multiple sending servers to a single record.
Here’s an SPF record example from Office 365:
v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all
Looks complicated?
It’s not. Here’s what the components of an SPF record mean:
Setting up SPF alone is not enough for optimal email deliverability.
You must also set up two other email authentication protocols called DKIM and DMARC. Here’s what they’re good for:
It’s essential you set up all three DNS records to increase your chances of reaching the inbox. Remember, emails that don’t get read can’t convert into meetings or sales.
What would happen if you started sending hundreds of cold emails a day from a domain without a sender reputation?
The emails will go to the spam folder!
To prevent this, slowly build up your sender reputation first.
How?
By starting with a low volume of emails and increasing that number slowly.
But just slowly increasing the sending volume isn’t enough. You must also get replies to those emails so that email service providers know your emails are valuable.
Oh, and any of your warm-up emails that do land in spam must also be moved to the inbox.
Sounds like a heck of a job, doesn’t it?
Well, that’s why email deliverability tools like Mailivery exist.
Mailivery does all the heavy lifting for you so you can concentrate on high-value tasks.
Mailivery Starters plan comes with a free 7-day trial so you can start warming up your email today.
Need to Set Up SPF on Another Domain Provider?
We also have tutorials on:
The easiest way to get responses to your cold emails.
