Hello Daryl,
Thursday, March 10, 2005, 5:51:26 PM, you wrote: DCWOS> Whatever your favourite way of retrieving DNS records is, will work. DCWOS> On Windows you could use nslookup, at a command prompt: ...
Thanks. That's a good start. Now, how will I know when a domain has an SPF record to validate upon? What do they look like?
When I do this on your domain, I see a TXT record that begins
v=spf1
and has what appears to be two SMTP system addresses (a:), and an ~all.
My own domain's SPF record doesn't end in ~all so I'm not sure which domain you queried.
Would I be correct to read it as,
If you receive email that you can verify comes from one of these two SMTP machines, then you can be confident that the email does indeed come from this domain. However, the ~all indicates that we do not limit all email users to these two machines, and you could receive valid domain email from other sources.
You've pretty much got it... ~all stands for soft fail, which does mean that there may be some mail that comes from unlisted hosts, but most should come from the listed hosts.
Checkout http://spf.pobox.com for more info.
If you go to that page and enter a domain that already has an SPF record in the text box on the left side of the page, it'll explain what each part of the record means half way down the page.
Daryl
