SPF: Sender Policy Framewrok

Overview

Technical standard, form of email authentication, that helps protect email senders and recipients from spam, spoofing, and phishing.

It defines a way to validate that an email message was sent from an authorized mail server, in order to detect forgery and to prevent spam. It was designed to supplement SMTP, because SMTP does not include any authentication mechanisms.

SPF Record

An SPF record is included in an organization's DNS database. An SPF record is a specially-formatted version of a standard DNS TXT record.