FAQ - Updating SPF Record
It is your responsibility to understand the full ramifications of modifying or implementing an SPF record. Do not make any changes to your DNS Zone records unless you have a full understanding of the outcomes. M2 Technology Group Pty Ltd. cannot be held liable for changes that you make to your DNS Zone record, nor any subsequent consequences of an incorrectly configured DNS Zone record.
This article explains how to prevent emails sent by CommTrak being rejected as spam, by the recipient's email server.
In this article:
Authorising CommTrak to Send Emails
Introduction
When CommTrak sends an email on your behalf, it will send the email using your email address (e.g. you@yourorganisation.com.au), or another email address relating to your organisation, as appropriate (e.g. support@yourorganisation.com.au) in the From field of the sent email.
Examples of sending emails from CommTrak include:
- Contact email (e.g. Notes tab on a Customer screen)
- Workflow task email
- Ticket reply
- CommTrak Notifications
Although these emails are sent with your email address specified as the From address, the emails are actually sent by a CommTrak email server (i.e. not from your organisation's email server), which is a technically legitimate, and industry standard, method of sending emails.
However, to reduce the opportunity for malicious actors to take advantage of the ability to send an email From anyone (known as sender address forgery), a well-configured mail server will reject emails that have been sent from an unauthorised mail server.
Until you designate the CommTrak email servers as being authorised to send email from your domain, it is likely that an email recipient's mail server will reject the email as junk mail.
Authorising CommTrak to Send Emails
To authorise a CommTrak email server to send emails on behalf of your organisation, you must update or create a DNS Zone SPF record for your domain (e.g. yourorganisation.com.au).
Typical steps for updating the DNS Zone are:
- Sign-in to your domain provider's control panel
- Locate the Edit DNS Zone feature
- Select your domain
- Add (or modify) the SPF TXT record
The exact steps for creating the SPF entry will differ, depending upon your domain name service provider.
Please locate your service provider's help pages for specific information relating to their DNS Zone editing features.
Do not make changes to your DNS Zone records unless you have a full understanding of the consequences. We strongly recommend that you request assistance from your domain service provider, or your IT service provider, if you are not familiar with editing DNS Zone records.
SPF Record
To authorise CommTrak to send emails using your organisation's domain name, you can add the following TXT record to your DNS Zone
include:_spf.commtrak.com.au
The following image is an example of how the entry may appear in a typical DNS Zone editor, in a domain provider's control panel:
Microsoft 365 and other Third Party Email
If your organisation currently uses Microsoft 365 email (or another third-party email-service provider), an SPF record may already exist in your domain's DNS Zone. In this case, the existing SPF record will need to be updated to authorise both CommTrak and Microsoft's (or other third-party) email servers, to send email on behalf of your organisation.
An example of a valid SPF record with two entries (e.g. CommTrak and Outlook) is shown below:
v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:_spf.commtrak.com.au -all
A DNS Zone can only contain a single SPF record. When adding the SPF entry for CommTrak, please ensure that you do not create a second SPF record. Where two or more SPF entries are required, they must be combined into a single SPF record. Multiple SPF records will result in an error, potentially causing both records to be ignored, which may result in all email from the designated servers being rejected by the recipient's email server, as junk mail.
DNS Propagation Time
Once you have made changes to a DNS Zone, the modifications may not immediately propagate to the rest of the Internet. Please allow up to 48 hours for DNS changes to become effective.