Authorizing Cloudbeds as a Sender for your Property Domain via Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

Introduction

Depending on your needs, you may wish to send emails via Cloudbeds to yourself or guests from your property’s @domain.com address for new reservations, check-ins, etc. via Cloudbeds email templates or compositions

Cloudbeds delivers those emails via the Sendgrid email service. By including Sendgrid in your domain’s DNS SPF records, you can avoid emails sent from cloudbeds on your domain’s behalf ending up in the recipients spam folder, or worse, rejected

What is the Sender Policy Framework (SPF)?

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication standard that compares the email sender’s actual IP address to a list of IP addresses authorized to send mail from that domain. The IP list is published in the domain’s DNS record.

SPF Authentication

Cloudbeds sends your emails via sendgrid, so you’ll need to create an SPF record set for your root domain (i.e. yourdomain.com) having `include:sendgrid.net`.

If you do not have an SPF record for your domain you must create a TXT record with the value:

`v=spf1 include:sendgrid.net ~all`

Do not create more than one SPF1 records for your root domain. If you need more than one SPF record, you must merge the additional SPF records into a single SPF record.

Already have an SPF record for your domain?

Simply add the SendGrid include mechanism lookup into your existing record.

For example, if your record looks like this:

`v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.google.com ~all`

You would add sendgrid’s lookup at the end of the string, before the ~all mechanism:

`v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.google.com include:sendgrid.net ~all`

How do I confirm my SPF record is valid?

We recommend dmarcian’s free SPF Survey tool.

What happens if I don’t configure SPF and send emails from Cloudbeds from my email domain?

Recipient mail servers may reject your emails from Cloudbeds or send them to spam folders. This depends on the configuration of each recipient mail server.

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