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Michiel van den Broek's avatar
Michiel van den Broek
Iron Contributor
Jan 25, 2017

Adding an external mailserver with SPF record (Webhost mailserver) to use with website contact form

Don't know if this is the correct place within the community to ask this question.   When I configure Office 365 and start migrating mailboxes, I check if my customer has a (wordpress) website that...
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VasilMichev's avatar
VasilMichev
MVP
Jan 25, 2017

You can simply use a service such as SendGrid, which is free for "normal use". And it's sort of allowed to spoof you by default.

 

Anyway, you should *not* use "?all", in fact you should not use anything apart from "-all" once the SPF record is setup with all hosts. Multiple include clauses can also be tricky as they exhaust the DNS lookups, but in general you should be safe nowadays. In your case if it's a single SMTP server you can do something like this:

 

v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:servers.mcsv.net ip4:1.2.3.4 -all

 

where you need to provide the ip address of the server.

  • Michiel van den Broek's avatar
    Michiel van den Broek
    Iron Contributor
    Jan 25, 2017

    hi Vasil,

     

    After posting my question here,  I read the technet article again that I found previously.

    https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3aff33c5-1416-4867-a23b-e0c0c5b4d2be(v=exchg.150)

     

    Thanks for mentioning the ?all. It is what Mailchimp writes in it's instruction. I changed it to -all and that is also accepted by the Mailchimp verification check, so guess it's ok. Didn't send any newsletters with mailchimp, so not 100% sure. :-)

     

    Does the reference to the mailserver has to be an ip address? So it cannot be an SMTP address that I could also use in any mailapp? In the instructions at my webhost they mention this instruction:

     

    SMTP Server: mail17.*MyWebhostDomain*.com
    SMTP Port: 225   SSL/secured: No
    or
    SMTP Port: 465   SSL/secured: Yes (SSL/TLS)
    Authentication: Yes, required

     

    I used these settings to configure the Wordpress SMTP add in. It tells me it succesfully mailed a test email, but it doesn't arrive in my Outlook mailbox in Office 365.

     

    So, I changed the SPF in my DNS to the following:

    v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:servers.mcsv.net include:mail17.*MyWebhostDomain*.com -all

     

    Waited an hour. Nothing arrives... Is there a place in Exchange I can see what is rejected?

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