Updating SPF Records for 'Bounced' or Undelivered Guest Emails
Posted by Jeff Tweddale on 01 Sep 2015 10:42 AM


Some customers send Letters (such as Confirmation Letters, Group Contracts, Registration Letters, etc) to email addresses where the email 'bounces; or is not received by the guest.

The most common cause of this is more strict email sending policies are SPAM that many ISPs and email providers are enforcing. As such, you need to "allow" BookingCenter to send email on behalf of your website domain. When you add this SPF record to your domain, email will not be an issue moving forward.


For properties that choose to use their domain based email, and have SPF enabled with a hard fail condition, we recommend you add an SPF record for our netblock of 209.237.231.0/25 .  

A sample SPF record if you didn't already have one defined could look like this 

v=spf1 mx a ip4:209.237.231.0/25 -all

Breaking this down, this defines allowed senders as any of the MX records (inbound mail servers) for your domain, as well as the IP address of the root A record of your domain, and any server in our 209.237.231.0 netblock.

If you aren't familiar with SPF, we recommend you use a generator tool like https://www.spf-record.com/generator that can pull your existing SPF record and allow you to make modifications. If you have an existing SPF record and aren't sure of what to change, you can open a support ticket providing the domain in question and our support team can assist you in determining what to add to the record.  Please be aware BookingCenter doesn't control the DNS for your domain, and cannot make those changes for you.

For SPF authentication to pass, all these conditions must be met:

  1. you have exactly 1 SPF record on your domain;
  2. the record's syntax is correct;
  3. the total number of DNS lookups can't exceed 10. 

 

Please look in your DNS entry to make sure there is only 1 TXT record, it is important that you don't have 2 SPF records.

Record TypeNameValueTTL
TXT yourdomain.com v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com -all Default

 

You may have a situation where you are SPF approving another service to send emails from your domain, such as 'outlook.com' in which case the 1 TXT file on your DNS will have TWO SPF records:

  • one for Outlook (which might look like: v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all)
  • and one for BookingCenter (which should be v=spf1 mx a ip4:209.237.231.0/25 -all)

In such as case, the SPF record might look like this : v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com ip4:209.237.231.0/25 -all which will allow BOTH Outlook and BookingCenter to be supported via the SPF record.

 

MyPMS currently does not support DKIM signing of emails.

 

Updating your SPF records involve changing your DNS settings. Depending on the company that hosts, or is the registrar for your website (i.e. GoDaddy, 1&1, etc), the steps below may differ somewhat, but are consistent (note there are screen shot attached for each step that may assist with the process).

 

  1. Login to your Domain and go to your DNS Records
  2. Click ‘Add a DNS Record’
    1. Often you will be presented with a list, such as the first screen shot 
  3. Choose a TXT record 
  4. In the most DNS systems, enter the following:
    1. The Host Name will be blank
    2. The value will be: v=spf1 mx a ip4:209.237.231.0/25 -all
    3. TTL: We recommend an hour (3600 seconds)
    4. Click ‘Save’
  5. We would recommend waiting about an hour and then you can check your SPF and DNS records at: https://mxtoolbox.com/dnscheck.aspx.

 
Some additional recommendations

1. You can only have ONE SPF record. SPF supports multiple entries, but you can only have one (single) SPF record.
2. You can check your existing SPF and DNS records at: https://mxtoolbox.com/dnscheck.aspx. Simply enter your domain (i.e. bookingcenter.com) and go to SPF Record Look-up. This screen will show you if the record is updated correctly (in green) or if there is a problem it will show in red and tell you the issue(s) that need to be corrected.



Attachments 
 
 1_dns_record_list.jpg (126.97 KB)
 2_dns_add_record.jpg (118.91 KB)
 3_dns_add_txt_record.jpg (56.69 KB)
 4_dns_record_check_dns_tools.jpg (205.23 KB)
(11 vote(s))
Helpful
Not helpful

Comments (0)
Post a new comment
 
 
Full Name:
Email:
Comments:
CAPTCHA Verification 
 
Please enter the text you see in the image into the textbox below (we use this to prevent automated submissions).