Do you know what a SPF record is?
No?
Neither did I until Microsoft decided to class me as a spammer, and if you read on you might just save yourself from loosing several days of your life trying to implement one.
Me Sir, a ’spammer’?
Anyway, to understand what I’m rambling on about we need a bit of background, and why this ‘SPF Record’ is getting me so wound up.
I, unlike the majority of people with common sense, use Hotmail as my primary email provider, and have done since I first starting using the Internet. In fact I had my Hotmail address before it became part of the Microsoft empire. One thing that annoys me however, is that I am now having to put up with more and more spam, despite efforts to curtail it.
We all know the stress of sorting through spam, and thank the people who work on solutions to filter out or just stop that crap coming through. However, I am sure you will understand my annoyance when I found out that thanks to the configuration of my (dv) dedicated-virtual server I have in fact been branded a ’spammer’ by Microsoft, and as a result they appear to be black holing any mail sent to a Hotmail account from my (dv).
Before I go any further I would just like to clarify that this is in fact nothing to do with the (dv) server as a product or Media Temple, but rather the way in which a virtual server environment works. I have found dozens of references via Google of people complaining of the same problems, and interestingly most seem to refer to people running VPS environments using Plesk.
As with all things, when something goes wrong, you have to learn how it works to be able to fix it, and thus I have been learning some of the ins and outs of running mail servers and the DNS system.
Disclaimer: At this point I would just like to say I only have a (very) basic idea about how either work, so don’t take anything I say as gospel, …
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