Samad’s Blog

I register my domains through GoDaddy.com. Lately a lot of my e-mails have been bouncing, so I thought I would finally get off my lazy ass and implement an SPF record. For those who don’t know, an SPF record is basically just a verification stamp that the e-mail address is valid at the domain its being sent from. Anyway, most of my domains I can control through my private hosting setup. Only one domain can’t be controlled through it, because I don’t host that on the same server as my other sites (its a Googlepages site at a domain). All my e-mail is hosted using Google Apps For Your Domain, and their SPF page is here.

For DNS management on that domain, I have to use GoDaddy.com. I’m thinking “no biggie, it should be the same way I did it on these.” WRONG! GoDaddy created an interface, which ended up screwing everything up even more because I had no idea what was going on. I would think that at least they would have a place where someone could manually type in the record, but they don’t even have that. Luckily while searching on Google I stumbled upon this post which described it in its entirety and cleared up my confusion. Below is a quote of the steps that need to be taken.

1. Login, and go to the “Total DNS Control Panel”
2. Under the TXT section, click “Add SPF Record”
3. Select “An ISP or other mail provider” and click OK
4. Select the “Outsourced” tab, and enter aspmx.googlemail.com as the outsourced domain
5. Click OK
6. GoDaddy will display a confirmation with the correct SPF record listed.
7. Click OK

And that’s it! When you click OK, it will generate what the SPF record will look like - it should look like this: v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all

Once it looks like that, simply wait and it will propogate through the system. Now you have an SPF record for that domain!