Using SPF to reduce spam in your NPS email surveys

Setting up SightMill to use SPF settings in DNS to reduce the chance your NPS email survey will be classed as spam

Everyone hates spam email – at best it’s a nuisance to filter and a waste of time to delete and sort through; at worst, it contains links to suspect sites, malicious code and traps for the unwary. The good news is that all of the major email platforms and client software include sophisticated features to remove as much spam as possible before it arrives in your InBox.

If you are sending out mass email campaigns, for example marketing campaigns or NPS surveys, you need to be careful to work with the standards that will identify your emails as safe and spam-free. If you don’t follow these, you could find that your emails are classed as spam and they end up in a spam folder or your recipients never receive them.
When using SightMill, there are a few key rules you should follow to ensure your email surveys are not treated as spam.

Reduce spam with SPF (sender policy framework)

To help reduce the chance that your outgoing NPS email surveys are classed as spam, setup SPF.

SPF was introduced as a way of identifying if the sender of an email was a legitimate user of the domain name. This is a relatively simple system that tries to block phishing (where someone imitates your email address to send what could be perceived to be a legitimate email.

Let’s take a simple example, if I own the domain ‘johndoe.com’ and send email from this domain, then I am a legitimate user. If you receive an email from me at johndoe.com, you would expect it to be a real email from me. However, it’s surprisingly easy for anyone to change the information at the start of an email and pretend to be sending from johndoe.com.

To get around this, SPF was introduced as an authentication stamp that tells a recipient that the email they’ve received is really from johndoe.com. SPF is not fool-proof, but it is seen as one of the main ways of identifying real email traffic compared to spam.

How to setup SPF for SightMill

If you’re using SightMill to send email surveys and want to send them from your own domain name, you will need to add an SPF entry to your domain name server (DNS) records to clearly identify SightMill as an authorized sender of your emails. SPF entries are added as TXT records in the DNS. Your hosting or name registrar will have its own method of allowing you to edit the DNS and add a TXT record.
  1. Check your current SPF settings using SPF testing tools.
  2. The SPF settings are included in your DNS as a TXT record
  3. You can only have one TXT record that refers to your SPF settings and the entry is limited to 255 characters long.
  4. To ensure SightMill can send on your behalf, include this entry in your SPF record:
include:sightmill.com
A typical SPF entry for the domain 'my-domain.com' might look like this:
          v=spf1 include:sightmill.com include:my-domain.com ?all

If you don’t add the SPF code to your DNS entry and you enter your own domain name in the reply-to or from address section of SightMill, then there is a good chance that some of the big email platforms will class your surveys as spam. In particular, Outlook.com, MSN, AOL, Gmail will all block emails sent by one provider (SightMill.com) but with from address set to a different domain name – unless you have setup SPF (this is true of any email survey or marketing platform that emails on your behalf and is not specific to SightMill).



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