Adding SPF to ensure email delivery using Relatude CMS

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) increases the chance of your emails being sent and not received as SPAM by the recipient, and for Relatude CMS to function optimally as a relay for your mailing lists and other emails sent from the system.

Why do you need SPF?

SPAM and other email scams and forgeries are a big problem and SPF is the easiest way for you to make sure that the emails you send are authorized as being legitimate.

Google and most other big email providers automatically detects if emails are originating from a trusted source, and if they are not configured with SPF it increases the changes dramatically for it being marked as SPAM.

SPF works by you as a domain owner specifying which servers are allowed to send emails on behalf of your domain. If you are using Office 365 or another hosting provider for your email you probably already have SPF set up to authorize their servers to send on behalf of your domain.

Adding SPF to allow Relatude CMS to be authorized to send on behalf of your domain is a two-step process. First you configure the domain, and then you must change the email provider in the Relatude CMS installation settings.

Configuring SPF for your domain

Before you get started you need access to the administration panel for your domain's DNS. If you are not an IT professional we advice you to ask the company hosting your domain for help, or to get in contact with us.

Our new email service is: email.services.relatude.com

This is the server that you will have to add as trusted server in your new or existing SPF record.

A SPF entry is a TXT record, so first look for an existing TXT record with a value starting with "v=spf1".

It might look like this: "v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all".

There should only be ONE SPF record per domain, so if you already have one, you should edit that record and not make a new record.

The example given above is how an SPF record (value) looks like for Office365.

If we wanted to add email.services.relatude.com to the existing SPF record it would look like this:

"v=spf1 include:email.services.relatude.com include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all".

A SPF record should be created for the domain, which means that the record should not have a host value. The following example from godaddy.com shows how the host is set to @ which corresponds to a blank value.

spf

Exactly how each hosting provider's administration panel looks like and what kind of terminology they use can differ.

Change the email provider in Relatude CMS

Here is a short explanation on how to configure it using the new interface and the classical interface.

The new interface

In the new interface click the gear icon in the left menu:

Then click the Installation element:

Now you need to scroll down to the Outgoing mail provider and replace the existing value with "WAF.Presentation.Email.RelatudeSmtpWebService"

Click Save.

The classical interface

Click the wrench icon in the top menu.

The click the System menu item in the top menu and then Settings.

In the Installation settings scroll down to Outgoing mail provider and select "WAF.Presentation.Email.RelatudeSmtpWebService" from the dropdown list like shown below.

Click Save and close.

Resources

Here is a list of resources for information about SPF and examples of how different hosting providers configures SPF for their clients.

In english:

Test your SPF configuration with mxtoolbox.com

In norwegian: