“What should my SPF record be if I have services with Hosting UK, either shared hosting or standard email such as Silver and I am not having email delivered by any third parties?”

Well I am very glad you asked you have come to the right place.

Assuming that you are happy with the broad brush of anything in your zone file, and any of your allocated email servers being allowed to send and everything else being dropped then the following should do the trick for you as a TeXT (TXT) record within your DNS Zone file.

v=spf1 +mx +a include:smtpout.hostinguk.net -all

The line in full, is going to look something a little like this:

[my.domainname.com]       IN     TXT    v=spf1+mx+a include:smtpout.hostinguk.net-all

…depending on what control panel, with who, and so on – but you get the general idea – four separate columns, or if you are properly old school and configuring this in a text file – then you WILL need quotes, there is a dot required in column one, AND you really don’t need to be reading all of this do you? No.

The important inclusion in there is the include. This allows your SPF to work as we evolve our mail offerings without you having to make updates from time to time when mail starts bouncing. Cool huh? Yes.

What an SPF does for those who are wondering why they are reading this, it controls (for mail servers that support it) who is allowed to send for a specific domain. It is a list of who is allowed to send as your domain (people will pretend to be you – trust us) – the parts of the example above show the version, that A records are allowed to send, that MX records are allowed to send (your email servers), anything that we include in our own one, and the key is the -all at the end, specifically the minus… which means that anything that doesn’t meet this requirement is denied – and is bounced back to the sender with a message citing a 5xx code, and a message that mentions SPF or Sender Policy Framework.

So.. there we have it.

Happy ‘mailing people.