Pointing SPF to Valimail will basically allows you to leverage our patented instant SPF technology. That is why performing this step is a very important part or the onboarding process.

Through our patented instant SPF technology, we leveraging Macros from the SPF specs using the brackets below, so that when a query is done by the receiver's gateway, the SPF Macro will fill in the blanks of what's needed for any receiver that's out there so that whatever you say you use, will automatically be aligned for SPF once we add it to this list. That is we need to make sure that the Enabled Senders list only represents what you officially use.

The Macros that Valimail uses are as follows:

${i} - The IP address of the server that sent the email

${h} - The EHLO/PTR name of the server that sent the email

${d} - The Mail From domain

Therefore, when an email receiver will see this, it will recognize it's an SPF Macro and it will see the correct values for the respective queried item. In doing so, our response will be just for that sending service/specific IP.

So if an email comes from M365 for example, we do not respond with your whole SPF record containing all your services, like a regular DNS host does for example - we will only respond with the specific SPF include for M365.

This is the instant and targeted response that the SPF Macro brings to the table and what sets it miles apart from the way DNS hosts are responding to these queries. This action described above, allows the SPF Macro to act as an umbrella, underneath you can have as many services and IP as you want, without ever having to worry about the 10 SPF lookup limit anymore.