Monday 2 April 2018

DNS Spf and quoted space

When configuring various DNS records you may occasionally run across

Warning: A record for this domain has whitespace but is not a "quoted string" and therefore is split into separate strings at whitespace. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC join those strings without spaces, which can cause "problems, especially for Sender Policy Framework records. 


Warning: A record for this domain starts with "v=spf1" but lacks a quoted space following the '1'. This may be a badly formatted Sender Policy Framework record that will be ignored by mail software."

Unfortunately (as of Apr 2018) the support answer
https://support.google.com/a/answer/33786?hl=en
offers the following example which is incorrect imho;-

v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all

The correct syntax for an SPF record using Google DNS is:-

"v=spf1_" "include:_spf.google.com" "~all"

You could also review the following for more background;-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework