Question

How to set up SPF for Google Apps and Sendgrid

Posted on March 13, 2024
Trust & Security Email
Asked by Dow Drake

I’m using sendgrid.com to send emails from my Django app to confirm user’s emails during registration, and for other notification purposes. The sender for these emails is webmaster@ifbt.farm. I added CNAME records per the sendgrid instructions.

I later set up a Google business account with two email addresses, ddrake@ifbt.farm and kdrake@ifbt.farm. I added MX records per the Google instructions.

I’ve read a bit about SPF, and I understand that I need to add a txt record, with an include directive, but I need to be sure that I’m not blocking any of these emails.

The article https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-a-spf-record-for-your-domain-with-google-apps seems quite old, and contains a broken link.

Can someone help me out with the correct SPF text line for this case?

Thanks

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Dow Drake • March 20, 2024

Accepted Answer

Hi Bobby,

Thanks for your help on this. I finally got a clear answer back from SendGrid support. Quoting Yashashwini:

The SPF that we instruct our users to add (via [domain authentication–see here for more](https://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/Settings/Sender_authentication/How_to_set_up_domain_authentication.htm l)) is created using a different hostname value for the CNAME which ensures other SPF records (TXT) are left unaffected. If you do have any examples of SPF failures for messages sent via SendGrid and want further investigation, please provide us some examples and additional context for us to troubleshoot.

Based on this, I’m going to leave the automated SendGrid security as is and simply add this TXT record v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all to my domain so that my Google Workspace emails have SPF enabled. The SendGrid emails should continue to work with SPF enabled.

Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• March 13, 2024

Hey!

In general, all that you would need to do in order to add the Google SPF, is to create a TXT record with the following content:

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

Here is the official Google documentation for this:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/10684623?hl=en

However, in your case, you want to ensure that both Google and SendGrid are authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain.

And as SendGrid has some custom automation in place, you might need to reach out to the SendGrid support team so that they can advise you further on how to add the Google domain reference to their custom SPF automation. As it is not really clear from their documentation if there is a way to do this:

https://docs.sendgrid.com/ui/account-and-settings/spf-records

Since you’re using Google Workspace and SendGrid, your SPF record will need to include both. It’s important not to create multiple SPF TXT records for a domain, as this can cause validation issues. Instead, you should combine the necessary parts into a single SPF record.

Let me know how it goes!

Best,

Bobby