Improve Campaign Deliverability - SPF Records
One issue that can be faced when sending email from an email marketing platform such as LiveWire Campaign, is that destination mail servers do not know if LiveWire campaign is permitted to deliver mail coming from your email domain.
SPF records allow you to specify which servers are allowed to send mail for your domain, and we would strongly recommend that you do set up a valid SPF record for your domain - as more and more mail servers are now giving emails a higher SPAM score if no valid SPF record can be found for the sending domain - or even worse, if an email is sent from a domain which has an SPF record, but from a server which is not shown as permitted to send the email.
To set up an SPF record for your domain, you will need to have access to (or make a request to someone who does have access to) the DNS records for your email domain.
A TXT record will need to be added to your domain configuration, containing the following:
- “v=spf1 a mx include:iwiremail.co.uk ?all”
Iwiremail.com is the domain which LiveWire Campaign uses for sending email - the section include:iwiremail.co.uk in the SPF record is what specifies that emails from LiveWire campaign servers are permitted. The other instructions specify that any mail server for your domain, or any other server which is registered on your domain (e.g. your web server) is also allowed to send email for your domain - these settings should be safe for most domains, but in some cases may need to be reviewed by an IT professional dependant on your domain configuration.
One thing to note, is that you will not be able to setup an SPF record if you are sending from a shared domain email address (e.g. hotmail.com / gmail.com / yahoo.com /etc.) - and this is just one of many reasons why you should never send email marketing campaigns from such an address.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you need further assistance or advice in setting an SPF record up for use with LiveWire Campaign - either post a comment, or send an email to support at livewirecampaign.co.uk.