I recently went through a process of updating our email hosting provider to add SPF records. Sage E-Marketing (AKA Swiftpage) uses email spoofing to make it appear as though emails are coming from your domain. I found no other documentation on this specific scenario, so I’ll write up my efforts for anyone else interested.
Quick rundown on SPF records and spoofing (if you’re already familiar, you can skip this)
When you send an email marketing blast through ACT! using Swiftpage, it is actually being sent from the Swiftpage server (not your company’s email server). So that your email doesn’t appear to your targets as “8fy29y2adjnq982c@swiftpage1.com”, it will spoof the from address to make it appear as though it is coming from your domain.
To prevent any old spammers from sending unsolicited emails that appear to be from your company, a popular feature called SPF Text Records is used. These add a validation process so that the receiving email target will check with your server to verify the server source.
Your email server may have an SPF record in place to prevent spammers from using your domain. As such, when Swiftpage tries to send an email masked as yours, it will be denied. This is the fix I found to allow emails to come from only your domain, and Swiftpage’s.
Adding SPF Exception for Swiftpage
I am simply documenting my process of setting this up. Your experience will almost certainly be slightly different.
Note: Swiftpage will generate an SPF record for you using the SPF Record Create Form. Although I have filled it out, I often have a long time of difficulty in hearing back from their support and can not testify as to how this works.
- Our current SPF record to allow for email sent from Network Solutions (our hosting provider) was
v=spf1 include:spf.netsolmail.net -all
- You need to find out which email server your account is on with Swiftpage. They have multiple servers (10, I believe). There are a few ways to do this- the easiest, go to http://swiftpageconnect.com and log in. When you are redirected, your url will show which server your account uses. In our case, it is swiftpage8.com. An alternate method would be to check the headers from a Swiftpage test email.
Log in to swiftpageconnect.com and check the URL to find out the specific server your account is hosted on.
- Modify your SPF record by adding an “include” for your Swiftpage domain. In our case, this was
v=spf1 include:spf.netsolmail.net include:swiftpage8.com -all
- There is no limit to syntax for “include:” to allow as many servers as you like. The process will be the same to add in more.
Good luck! Call us at 716.837.5727 with questions.