How To Create and Set Up an SPF Record For Your Google Workspace Account

There is never enough cybersecurity and protection in the digital age. While massive security breaches, data leaks, denial of service (DDoS) attacks as well as other cyberattacks are on the horizon but one security threat that is often overlooked: fake as well as malicious messages.

The security of emails may not always be at center of an organization's thoughts but it ought to be. Most of the employees has an email address registered on the domain of the organization. The majority of people in that organization sends an average of 121 emails daily. But how many are legitimate, safe and authentic?

For you to put a number on it, 6.4 billion spam emails are daily. This is 6.4 billion potential victims of cyber-attacks.

The setting up of an Google SPF account in the use of your Google Workspace is just one option to reduce the chances of being a victim.

The Threat of Email

Email remains one of the most popular ways that malware can infect your network. According to the PurpleSec's most recent Cybersecurity Trends report Malicious actors spread malware via email for 90% of the time.

Fortunately, users can utilize the email authentication techniques to safeguard themselves from cyberattacks.

Particularly specifically, specifically, SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is the most commonly used authentication method used for email at present. SPF assures you that the email you received is originated from a server legally authorized to communicate emails for the domain. In addition, it ensures that any suspected attackers or spoofers aren't sending emails for your domain.

How Does SPF Work?

Your emails are sent to you with the “from” address. In the event of an attack the spammers could fake these “from” addresses and send false messages using a valid domain name, such as yours.

To identify fake emails such as those, receiving servers run SPF checks to verify that the emails are sent from email servers authorized to send emails to your domain. To verify an SPF authentication then, the receiving server conducts an DNS search using the domain's name to validate the SPF record to ensure that the server from which the email originates from is correctly identified.

If the server's IP address is shown this means that it's authorized to transmit email from the domain of the sender. The email is able to pass the SPF test and is able to be delivered to the inbox of the user.

If the IP address does not appear listed in the email's DNS entries, the recipient server might flag the email as spam, or refuse the email completely.

Do I Need to Set Up an SPF Record?

In short? Yes.

With the use of SPF in conjunction with DMARC Your domain is secure from malicious cyberattacks that could damage customer relations, efficiency, and ultimately the bottom line.

Three components make up solid security for email authentication. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Together, these three components combine to assist users to protect themselves from phishing and spoofing attacks. For more details about SPF, DKIM, DMARC and how SPF together with DMARC can prevent malicious attacks, check out any the following guides:

• What is SPF?
• What is DKIM?
• What is DMARC?

Making An SPF records for the domain could aid in preventing that your website from getting used for malicious attacks, thereby protecting your email delivery rates as well as your company's image.

Create a Google Workspace SPF Record in 4 Simple Steps

Just one action to infect a system and possibly compromise the entire business. With the right tools and data and techniques, even the most insidious attacks can be stopped. Here are a few easy steps you can follow now to avoid phishing attacks of every kind:

Before starting, make sure you know the mail server is used by your company for sending emails. This tutorial is beneficial when you are using Google Workspace (formerly Google Apps/G-Suite) However, it can also be used with different mail servers.

1. Log into your domain account

The first step is to sign in to your domain provider , then visit the page on which you can modify the DNS record for your domain. The procedure for accessing DNS records can be different based on the service you are using.

Here's how to access your DNS records using GoDaddy as well as Namecheap.

If you aren't sure the location where you can get access to your DNS records then you can use the search feature of the knowledge base of your domain provider to determine the location where the DNS configurations or DNS manager is located.

2. Find TXT records

When you are in your DNS management, you'll be able to see different kinds of records including A, CNAME, MX, TXT, SRV, as well as AAAA. SPF records are simple text files, so go into the TXT section to create your SPF record.

3. Create an TXT record

You can choose the default values for the host field and TTL field, as well as the text field is used to show the mail servers you are using to send emails.

If, however, you're creating to an SPF record on a particular subdomain, you must fill within”host” in the “host” field with the name of the subdomain.

SPF records can contain the capacity of 255 characters. This is how an SPF record appears:

v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:example.com ip4:192.72.10.10 ~all

In this instance the user is sending emails to:

• The Google Workspace server (google.com)
• An external server (example.com)
• A server that has an IP address of 192.72.10.10.

Let's take a look at the tags that we'll be using in this instance.

• “v=spf1” is the version of the SPF record that is used.
• “include:” tag lets your SPF record the addresses of authorized domains “include:” tag lets your SPF keep track of the domain addresses that are authorized.
• “ip4” tags are used to identify IPv4 addresses “ip4″ tag includes IPv4 addresses. You may also utilize”ip6.” tag in conjunction with “ip6” tag if you make use of IPv6 addresses.
• “all” tag, also known as the “~all” tag, or the fail qualifier that is soft, implies that the server that receives the email will accept the email even regardless of whether it's in the SPF record, but it should mark the email as suspect. You can also make use of”-all” tag, or a fail qualifier “-all” tag, or fail qualifiers, which signifies that any messages sent from servers that aren't on your SPF record will be refused.

Understanding these four tags can aid you in completing your basic set-up. If you're just making use of Gmail to send out emails, here's what your to set up a SPF TXT record will appear:

v=spf1 include: _spf.google.com ~all

4. Keep the record

Once you're done, hit save. For your own safety make sure to check the DNS administrator to confirm that the record exists. This record is expected to be activated within 48 hours after saving