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Asked: 2026-05-27T12:39:08+00:00

I’m sending mails from my rails application but for some reason I never get

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I’m sending mails from my rails application but for some reason I never get SPF to pass, its always saying either failed or neutral.

I’ve got forward and reverse DNS set up (what I think is correct). I followed the guides here to no avail. The good thing is that my mail doesn’t end up in spam, but thats not enough for me, I want SPF to pass. If anyone can help me it would be appreciated.

I have my hostname set to mail.example.com. I have my reverse DNS set to the same. However, when I send mail I want it to come from help@example.com, not from help@mail.example.com. When I email from help@mail.example.com I get a neutral SPF, but when i change it to help@example.com, it fails. The way I understand is that if its still coming from the FQDN it should pass, but it doesn’t.

These are my DNS records:

A = mail xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
A = example. xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
A = www xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
MX = example. mailstore1.secureserver.net.
MX = example. smtp.secureserver.net.
MX = example. mail.example.com.
TXT = v=spf1 mx include:mail.example.com -all.

The first 2 MX records are from godaddy, but I’m hosting the site with slicehost. Also, I have a couple of CNAME and NS records that I don’t think are helpful but Im mentioning in case they are.

I’m using postfix on Ubuntu and rails 3.

Any ideas?

UPDATE:
Here is the header of one of my failed mails

Delivered-To: myemail@gmail.com
Received: by 10.229.49.65 with SMTP id u1cs60507qcf;
        Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:20:11 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.42.150.135 with SMTP id a7mr13973149icw.53.1323746409644;
        Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:20:09 -0800 (PST)
Return-Path: <help@example.com>
Received: from mail.example.com ([xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id y15si2866827ibk.138.2011.12.12.19.20.09;
        Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:20:09 -0800 (PST)
Received-SPF: fail (google.com: domain of help@example.com does not designate xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx as permitted sender) client-ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=hardfail (google.com: domain of help@example.com does not designate xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx as permitted sender) smtp.mail=help@example.com
Received: from localhost.localdomain (localhost [127.0.0.1])
    by mail.example.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id B6BB31C1F5D
    for <myemail@gmail.com>; Tue, 13 Dec 2011 03:20:08 +0000 (UTC)
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 03:20:08 +0000
From: Example <help@example.com>
To: myemail@gmail.com
Message-ID: <4ee6c468a8150_7e4e4ea930773a1@mail.example.com.mail>
Subject: Password Reset
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html;
 charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

SOLUTION:
Put quotes around the spf record, mine now looks like this:

TXT = "v=spf1 mx include:mail.example.com -all"
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Summary based on the comments:
    The quotes are important in the content of a TXT record. Space counts as a separator. I have met a DNS user interface where sloppily entering v=spf1 -all (note that quotes are missing) resulted in two atoms “v=spf1” “-all” instead of a single atom “v=spf1 -all”. Only the latter will work.

    Your SPF record is messed up. “include” is a redirection. You are saying that the SPF record of example.com is the SPF record of mail.example.com, and based on your question I guess this is not what you want. You should include all relevant DNS information (MX, A, TXT, SPF) in your question. Something like:

    example.com.  IN TXT "v=spf1 include:example.net -all"
example.net.  IN TXT "v=spf1 mx -all"
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